The United States national women’s soccer team has received $24 million and a promise for equal pay from their bosses at US Soccer. US Soccer had previously been paying the men’s soccer team more, even though the women are currently back-to-back World Cup champions and the men have never won. In fact, the men missed the tournament altogether back when it was last held in 2018.
Personally, I am very happy about this, and I think the entire country agrees. The women’s team is very clearly the more dominant squad out of the two, and it’s honestly very sad that it took this long for US Soccer to give them equal pay. Recently, they made a documentary on their fight for equal pay, and if you watched the documentary, you could see the women’s anger and frustration.
The star striker for the women, Alex Morgan, said, “I think it was just extremely motivating to see organizations and employers admit their wrongdoing, and us forcing their hand in making it right. The domino effect that we helped kick-start-I think we’re really proud of it.” A year ago, a judge dismissed the women’s equal pay demands, leaving doubt that they would succeed. “
What we set out to do was to have acknowledgement of discrimination from US Soccer, and we received that through back pay in the settlement,” Morgan said. “We set out to have fair and equal treatment in working conditions, and we got that through the working conditions settlement. And we set out to have equal pay moving forward for us and the men’s team through US Soccer, and we achieved that.”
Source: https://nytimes.com/2022/02/22/sports/soccer/us-womens-soccer-equal-pay.html
