US Women's Soccer Wage Discrimination

Who/What: The United Status Womens National Soccer Team renew their fight for equal pay. The "faces" of this movement include Alex Morgan, Hope Solo, Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd and Becky Sauerbrunn. These ladies are using the slogan “Equal Play Equal Pay” to promote their wage fight. According to The New York Times|Source: Federal complaint submitted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Note: The men’s bonus is an average based on a possible bonus range of $6,250 to $17,625 per win. Per player for each exhibition game: the men make $5k with a bonus win of $8,166. The women make $3,600 with a bonus win of $1,350. So basically the women are not making crap compared to the men. The women have proven themselves by bringing in more viewers and helping to generate more revenue according to statistics. While the men can barely get passed the first round in championship formats.

When: Spring of this year 2016 is when the women actually petition and spoke up about it. It was all over the sports news worldwide such as ESPN, PTI, Highly Questionable, etc.

Where: Not too entirely sure where to be precise. I want to say just as a club/team in general because the ladies came together as a unit to petition for this. U.S. Soccer, the governing body for the sport in America, pays the members of the men’s and women’s national teams who represent the United States in international competitions

Why: Pretty simple, the Women want what they work for. They've proven their worth by winning that illusive gold medal which is definitely not an easy thing to do. It is not like they are just trying to get paid more just for the hell of it, they actually have good reasoning for it which makes sense. On top of that, according to statistics and revenue, profits/views have sky rocketed due to them actually winning. They were able to generate more viewers which equals more money because that is basically what it all comes down to.

Identity: I think it is a mixture of two things. People who receive lower wages in general despite their hard work and women who receive lower wages because of their gender. Those two types of people can identify and relate because the US Womens team is fighting for what they believe is "earned", they just happen to be females instead of males. People who work hard should get out what they put in, just like the US Womens soccer team.

Works Cited: Yourish, Karen, Joe Ward, and Sarah Almukhtar. "How Much Less Are Female Soccer Players Paid?" The New York Times. The New York Times, 30 Mar. 2016. Web. 03 Sept. 2016.