Well, this was unexpected.
The U.S. women’s national soccer team and its leaders, such as outspoken captain Megan Rapinoe, have claimed for years that they were victims of sexist pay discrimination due to receiving lower compensation than the men’s team. Their spurious claims were defeated in court. But despite its legal victories and having no obligation to do so, U.S. Soccer has just caved to the baseless woke outrage mob. It’s giving the women’s team almost everything it wanted.
U.S. Soccer has announced a $24 million settlement with the team. Per the New York Times, “The bulk of that figure is back pay, a tacit admission that compensation for the men’s and women’s teams had been unequal for years.” What’s more, again per the Times, it has agreed to “equalize pay between the men’s and women’s national teams in all competitions.”
What’s the problem?
Well, the women’s team was never being unfairly discriminated against or underpaid due to sexism. The truth is that the players, while very successful in women’s competitions, have never been anywhere near equal to the men’s team in actual objective athletic prowess and competitive ability. That’s no fault of the women. It simply reflects undeniable biological differences between males and females that manifest themselves in different athletic abilities.
Don’t believe me? For reference, the women’s team lost by a humiliating 5-2 scoreline in an informal match against an under-15 men’s academy team. That’s right; some of the world’s best female soccer players lost to teenage boys. True equality between men and women does not mean giving them the same. It means giving all the compensation they deserve with no bias or unfairness on the basis of sex.
It’s also the case that men’s competitions, such as the World Cup, draw far bigger audiences than the women’s competitions. In 2014, the men’s FIFA World Cup final drew 1 billion viewers worldwide. By contrast, the 2019 women’s FIFA World Cup final drew 263.6 million viewers.
That’s still an astounding number of viewers. It represents huge interest in and progress for women’s soccer. But the discrepancy also shows why it’s not sexist for the men’s international team to receive much higher prize monies. It simply reflects commercial reality and demand. If the statistics were the opposite, the women could rightfully demand higher pay than the men!
Different pay rates are not necessarily discriminatory when they correspond with different objective merits and results. Yet when it comes to what U.S. Soccer actually pays the teams — not FIFA, an international body — it’s not clear that there even was a pay gap to begin with.
Let me explain.
The women have a different pay structure that includes salaries and bonuses, whereas the men only receive bonuses (this is what they negotiated for). According to the Washington Post’s fact-checkers, after a new agreement took effect in 2017, this meant that women earned somewhere between 90% to 100% of the men’s compensation over a typical 20-game sample. U.S. Soccer even pointed out that in the past, it has paid the women more than the men. Former President Carlos Cordeiro wrote in a 2019 fact sheet:
“Over the past decade, U.S. Soccer has paid our Women’s National Team more than our Men’s National Team. From 2010 through 2018, U.S. Soccer paid our women $34.1 million in salaries and game bonuses, and we paid our men $26.4 million.”
(Side note: U.S. Soccer has now deleted this fact sheet from its website.)
A federal judge validated this claim.
“The statements offered by Plaintiff [USWNT] are insufficient to establish a genuine dispute that [female players] are paid at a rate less than the rate paid to [male players],” Judge R. Gary Klausner wrote in his decision dismissing their case. “Defendant [U.S. Soccer] has presented evidence that the [USWNT] was paid more on both a cumulative and an average per-game basis than the [men’s team].”
Despite losing in court, the women’s team is winning anyway, getting a huge settlement, future compensation assurances, and a victory lap. This is unwarranted. And it’s not just a waste of money.
By caving to baseless feminist outrage, U.S. Soccer is setting a dangerous precedent that there are millions to be earned by crying “sexism” where it does not actually exist. It’s ceding to the dangerous idea that equality requires equal outcomes and emboldening the woke mob’s worst impulses.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a co-founder of Based-Politics.com, a co-host of the BasedPolitics podcast, and a Washington Examiner contributor.
