By Sarah Baker
Female soccer players at Peninsula College potentially face a future career not only grappling with other teams on the playing field, but also grappling with wage discrimination – off the field and on the grounds of institutional equality.
Recently, the United States has achieved a lot of milestones in the ongoing fight for gender equality. After the passing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the decision to make Harriet Tubman the new face of the $20 bill, it seems that the wage gap may become a thing of the past.
However, this is not true for the U.S. national soccer teams.
Players Carli Lloyd, Becky Sauerbrunn, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe and Hope Solo of the women’s national team filed a wage-discrimination action against the U.S. Soccer Federation with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Why? PC soccer player Cicely Warnick, 19, said, “Because people are sexist as hell and don’t appreciate that the women’s team is as good as they are.”
Warnick and her teammate Coby Yoshimura, 19, thought the women’s national team made approximately four times less than the men’s team.
“It’s something that comes with being a woman. The difference is probably in millions,” said Yoshimura.
Their estimates are not as close as they had expected. US women’s team players Sauerbrunn, Solo and Ali Krieger reported to Hasan Minhaj that the men make 13 times the amount that the women make.
For each game the women win, they make $1,300 whereas the men make $17,000. For each game they lose, the men make $5,000 while the women make not a single cent.
The women’s team performs better, too. According to Sauerbrunn, Krieger and Solo, the men’s team has only ever made it to round 16 in the World Cup.
The women have won three World Cups. They have also won four Olympic gold medals and are ranked no. 1 in the world while the men are ranked 30.
Money shouldn’t be an issue in this case, especially considering that within the last year, the women’s national team has brought in $17 million for the US Soccer Federation. The men have lost $2 million.
Based on this information, many of PC’s soccer players speculated that the wage gap must then be due to the fact that men’s games are more popular and largely watched in comparison to the women’s matches. This is also not true.
Minhaj reports the women’s team actually broke the record for the most viewers for a televised soccer game in American history.
Some players were not swayed by these statistics. “The women should be lucky to make as much as they do. They deserve to make less because the men play a rougher game,” said Trevan Estellado, 20, a PC men’s soccer player.
Sydney Leroux Dwyer, a player on the U.S. women’s team, would counter that women play as rough a game as the men’s team, considering they are constantly subjected to matches on AstroTurf instead of grass, something that has caused countless injuries for the female players.
Men have never once played on anything other than real grass. Yet the men still continue to lose while the women continue to win.
There are some Peninsula players who do acknowledge these facts.
Goalkeeper, Nick Johnson, 20, said, “Because they’re men. That’s the real reason. It’s the common misconception that men are better just because they’re men.”