The USWNT Won Equal Pay—But True Equality Is Still a Long Way Off
glamour.comGlamour.If it feels like the , the federation that runs the sport and is responsible for promoting the World Cup-winning women’s team, has been dragging on forever, that’s because it has.
Women in sports, and particularly soccer, have been fighting for equal pay and equal investment —, selling their own tickets, and working second jobs to pay the bills.The formal fight for equal pay in U.S.
soccer began six years ago when five of the USWNT’s most prominent players—Carli Lloyd, , Alex Morgan, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Hope Solo— with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) accusing the federation of wage discrimination.
That was followed by a lawsuit in 2019, in which the entire National Team sued for “,” citing the pay gap plus a lower standard in playing conditions from where they played to how they got there. (To the wage discrimination claim, USSF’s legal team at one point argued that .)It’s been, to put it mildly, a rollercoaster to get to this moment, Roux says. “Some days it feels like you're almost there and then the next day it's like, oh shit, we’re nowhere near [a resolution].”The pay dispute at the heart of the USWNT’s fight for equality is complex—total compensation for each team is determined by a mix of salaries, bonuses, and prize money from international competitions like the —but essentially boils down to this: Under the old pay structure, the USWNT had the opportunity to make just a fraction of what the U.S.
