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Is U.S. Women’s Soccer Getting Shortchanged?
By Roger Pilon of Cato.
"The U.S. Women’s World Cup team is back from Canada with victory
in its players’ pockets, but not much else, to judge from media reports
now unfolding. The question just above led a CBS Evening News story
tonight about the gross income inequality between male and female
professional soccer players—and in today’s battle between the sexes, few
issues are more demagogued or more inflame the adversarial passions
than inequality between the sexes. Indeed, we’re told that star goalie
Hope Solo took a picture of one fan’s sign calling for equal pay for
women athletes. Say no more.
But more was said, and the facts speak volumes. It seems that the
women’s team will split $2 million for their victory whereas the winner
of last year’s Men’s World Cup team, Germany, was awarded $35 million.
The prizes, however, are based on revenue, says FIFA, which runs the
World Cups, and the facts here are stark:
This year’s figures have not been released, but four
years ago the Women’s World Cup brought in almost $73 million. The 2010
Men’s World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion. Those players
got $348 million, or 9 percent of the total revenue. The women’s team
got a higher percentage with 13 percent, but the bottom line was still
much less, $10 million.
But don’t let those facts get in the way of sound egalitarian
reasoning. We get that from Deborah Slaner Larkin with the National
Women’s Sports Foundation:
We shouldn’t keep deciding who’s more important, our sons
or our daughters, our husbands or our wives. People should be treated
equally. We need to have some more male allies who will say this is not
acceptable.
Not acceptable? If so, then what’s to be done? It’s unclear since we
learn here that two women’s soccer leagues have already failed in the
U.S. and the current one, the National Women’s Soccer League, averages
only about 4,400 spectators a game. If you think this a tempest in a
teapot, think again. It’s a microcosm, with a thousand and one more
complex variations, of the debate that lies ahead in the political
season that’s already under way."
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