Should female soccer players have “equal pay”?

Last updated on: April 2, 2016 at 1:04 pm by Jane the Actuary

Should female soccer players have “equal pay”? 2016-04-02T13:04:24-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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That’s the claim in a complaint filed by 5 members of the US women’s national soccer team against the U.S. Soccer organization, protesting wage discrimination because the women’s team was paid nearly four times less than the men’s team, despite the women’s greater success internationally, based on rates for appearances in international competitions, among other factors. Sports Illustrated has a full table of the pay discrepancies. What’s more, according to NPR,

Citing U.S. Soccer’s annual financial reports, the complaint says that the group’s initial budget had projected a financial loss for both the men’s and women’s teams — but that the women’s national team’s success “almost exclusively” brought a projected $17.7 million profit. For the 2017 financial year, the players say, the federation now “projects a net profit from the WNT of approximately $5 million, while projecting a net loss of nearly $1 million for the MNT.”

At the same time, the entire compensation structure for the women’s team is different: NPR says,

The EEOC complaint acknowledges that U.S. Soccer pays top-tier female players $72,000 a year to play in those 20 games. But it notes that if a male player is paid only the base amount of $5,000 for 20 games — and loses them all — he would still make $1,000 more than a woman who wins all 20 of her games.

But, according to a Sports Illustrated commenter, DavidHoward1,

[A]ll of the USWNT pool players are salaried employees of the USSF. They get paid 64k per year plus benefits regardless of whether they are selected for the team or not. This is up front money. No such arrangement exists for the men’s team or anywhere else in men’s soccer as far as I know.

Which seems to suggest that, for national team “pool players”, not in the top-tier, the women are in fact better off than the men, who only get paid if they’re on a team.

And presumably this difference is because the men are playing on professional soccer teams, and the women are not, or are perhaps playing in the established-in-2012 National Women’s Soccer League, where, according to a google hit from Esquire, the pay ranges from $6,000 to $30,000. Hence, a salaried roster keeps women playing soccer professionally in a way that’s not needed in men’s soccer. And, since according to the US Soccer annual reports, they provide a $1.5 million annual subsidy to women’s soccer, these low pay rates are not due to some corporate big-wigs keeping all the women’s soccer revenues, but simply a result of low revenues. (Though, I have to say, the pricing is higher than I thought it’d be – tickets start at $25 per game for the Chicago Red Stars, compared to $17.75 for the Chicago Wolves minor league hockey, or starting at $16 for the WNBA. Perhaps the Women’s Soccer management has an expectation that spectators should be willing to pay higher prices as a good deed, like buying fair trade coffee, where the Wolves and the Sky both market themselves as an affordable, family-friendly alternative to high-priced men’s major league teams.

Another wrinkle is the fact that both the men and the women have collectively bargained, separately, and the women agreed to the lower wages in their bargaining, though there’s now a dispute over that contract. As ESPN describes,

The union representing the players is currently involved in a legal dispute with U.S. Soccer over the terms of their collective bargaining agreement. The federation filed a lawsuit this year seeking to clarify that its contract with the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team Players Association runs through the Rio Olympics until Dec. 31. The union maintains the memorandum of understanding agreed to in March 2013 can be terminated at any time.

Given this, why doesn’t the union follow collective bargaining procedures to resolve this?

Interestingly, I tried to hunt around to find articles on women’s vs. men’s pay in basketball, wondering if there are similar salaried vs. per-game arrangements in the national team. I came up empty – mostly because the search keywords triggered endless results for soccer – except for an article on the professional basketball leagues at Vice Sports, which reported that the in the women’s professional basketball league, the players are being paid about 1/3 of total revenues, compared to 1/2 of revenues going to men’s league players. Is this fair? The author ignores the fact that the teams have overhead costs which could reasonably mean that the “excess” revenue isn’t lining owners’ pockets but simply funding all the other expenses associated with running the team, and simply shrugs off questions of profitability with the assumption that all professional sports enterprises are highly profitable and any claims to the contrary are a matter of accounting trickery. But it does suggest that one key difference between the men’s and women’s teams are that the men have been more willing to go on strike. The author seems to suggest that the women are making a mistake in not doing so — but I would be surprised if such a tactic would be particularly successful.

That being said: it’s common sense that there should be pay differences, but if you think about the complaint purely in terms of equal pay laws, where do you end up? An employer may not pay employees in a differentiated way purely due to the employees’ sex. That much is clear. And an employer may not justify differences with claims that “that’s what the market will bear” — for instance, a school wishing to increase the number of male elementary school teachers might want to target pay increases to male teachers, because female teachers are clearly more accepting of lower pay than men (yes, I know that’s not necessarily the cause for the discrepancy — it’s an example), but that’d be against the law.

So what, then, would be the reasoning that US Soccer, or, say, an individual who owned both a NBA and a WNBA team, give for the differentiated pay? Could one say, “it’s common sense that the men’s team plays to a higher skill level”? The law, however, doesn’t allow for evaluating skill levels by sex, and then setting pay levels. Could one say that the men’s team and the women’s team are different entities, and thus pays don’t need to be the equal between those two entities? Or does the same fine print that allows for sex-distinct women’s teams, apply here?

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pay equity

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