U.S. Soccer Team Pay Differences – Sex Discrimination Yet Again?

One topic I have written on several times is different average earnings between men and women.  My first such post was from March 2015, in which I explained that while most women had the same career attitudes as most men, the share of those making choices reducing their earnings was significantly greater, and a variety of statistics, such as 94% dying on the job being male, bore that out.  The piece, which has had over 6,000 views, is at http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2015/03/yes-pay-gender-gap-is-real-but-its-not.html.  This January, hoping to get people to understand how the pattern could cause an illusion of heavier sex discrimination than exists, I released a fable putting the same situation into otherworldly terms, at http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-perception-problem-of-large-felines.html. 

Over the past several years, those writing on the income difference have, indeed, looked for other reasons.  Stephen J. Dubner’s “The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap,” (Freakonomics, January 7, 2016), was a compendium of possible alternative explanations, but including some constructive passages on less-known unfairness, such as behind-screen auditions increasing hiring of female symphony orchestra musicians.  My viewpoint came out in “Don’t Buy Into the Gender Pay Gap Myth” (Forbes, April 12^th, 2016), in which, to show the entrenchedness of the perception of discrimination, author Karen Agness Lips added a story of “a group of 70 undergraduate women at Harvard,” when asked if they thought they would earn 78% of men’s pay, most indicated yes.  In the May 13^th, 2017 New York Times, Claire Cain Miller opined that “The Gender Pay Gap Is Largely Because of Motherhood,” and named reasons among the 11 figures I had presented in the post above.  After a flurry of August-September 2017 writing about Google’s efforts to increase the share of women in technical positions (for example “Push for Gender Equality in Tech?  Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far,” in the September 23^rd New York Times), we had another piece similar to mine, in Mary Katharine Ham’s April 10, 2018 The Federalist “Equal Pay Day Hype Ignores The Facts and Women’s Feelings About The Workplace.”  Overall, some commentators are getting the message that even if two-thirds of women are getting 100% of men’s average earnings due to their willingness to put in as many hours, choose less comfortable and convenient jobs, work as late into life, and so on, the remaining one-third is more than enough to create the illusion that all women are routinely paid less.  

Yet, that is not all.  I have since seen many articles looking for pay-gap reasons beyond unfair treatment or differing choices, which is healthy.  On the other side, though, was a recent pack-journalism effort.  From the beginning of the Women’s World Cup soccer tournament, reporting of the United States Women’s National Team was intense and pervasive.  It surprised me, since the team was already familiar with success, having won the event three times, including its last running in 2015.  As the event progressed the stories became more and more political, focusing on how much the players earned instead of on their on-field skill, and after they again won it all the coverage became editorial, advocating paying them “equally” to the far-less-successful men’s team. 

There are problems with that.  In the July 8^th Washington Post, Meg Kelly dug into the situation with “Are U.S. women’s soccer players earning less than men?”  She found three things not covered by others.  First was that the women’s and men’s teams are, strangely enough, hard to compare financially, as the teams have made “different collective-bargaining agreements,” which included men getting only performance and number-of-games bonuses and women receiving salaries but smaller bonuses.  Second, fully half of the income of the paying organization, the U.S. Soccer Federation, comes from sponsorships, which include television rights and are often sold “as a bundle,” with men’s and women’s teams both included.  Third, the World Cup’s parent company, Fédération Internationale de Football Association or FIFA, pays prize money to national groups for success, but its total amounts are $400 million for men and $30 million for women.

With the media blitz, it is certain that the USSF women’s team has gained fans.  Will they now be as lucrative as the men’s?  I doubt it.  Of three other sports in which the sexes have long played professionally and separately at high levels, tennis, golf, and basketball, men’s event attendances and TV audiences have always been much higher.  College basketball is not even as close.  There are certainly exceptions within countries, but we’ll see how much, and how quickly, the money wants to follow.  In the meantime, we can’t forget that jobs of all kinds pay according to the cash value of their employees.  That is not discrimination.