The women’s soccer pay gap

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I saw that the women’s soccer team makes less than the men’s (USA). I also saw that the men’s teams make 9% of the total revenue while the women make 13% of the total revenue. Is there a source of money that women are not getting or something? If they want to increase the pay where would the money come from?

EDIT: There’s a bill that was introduced that would shut down the US hosting the World Cup until the pay gap was fixed. My question is how would it get fixed? I understand the women generate less revenue therefor make less. So how would they get paid more? If they were to increase the percentage they make from the revenue it would pay them more but then that would be unfair to the males.

In: Economics

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Women’s soccer brings in less revenue than men’s soccer. If an organization makes more money, it can afford to pay its employees more.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The dilemma isn’t from the percentage of the pot they earn that causes the “earning gap” it’s how much you fill the pot first, the mens team have more viewers, better sponsors and people paying into the pot before, the womens team also get a paid minimum on top unlike the men to offset this too so if they had the viewer/sponsorship as the men they would be making sooo much more than the men (not as likely to get the outcry though)

Anonymous 0 Comments

Smaller TV audiences and smaller crowds paying less money at the grounds, increase those and there is more money to pay the players.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Think of it as the difference between a garage band, and a big name band with a record deal.

The garage band doesn’t have any other ‘riders’ on their income. When they get paid for a gig, the members all split the money, and don’t have to pay anyone else.

The big name band’s record label gets a cut of his profits… but he makes a *ton* more money. The garage band makes a couple grand a year, and keep all of it. The big name band makes millions, and keeps hundreds of thousands.

The women’s team is getting a larger cut of a much smaller pie, because womens soccer isn’t as popular. It doesn’t get paid as much for ads, or get as large a payout for sponsorship deals, because not as many people are watching.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Used soccer/football interchangeably here – they both refer to soccer:

Less money in it means less pay for the athletes. There’s less money in it because, for the lack of a less mean explanation, the skill gap between mens and womens football is enormous.

Everyone remembers stories of someone being in the bottom set of their school’s football teams and being put against their county or area’s best female team and totally wiping the floor with them. We had something similar, we went 8-0 our way.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I can’t speak to those percentages, but assuming they are close enough to accurate…the number of tickets sold to the games, number of advertising firms, number and type of television coverage are just a few of the ways revenue is generated. If there was as much interest in women’s soccer as men’s it would appear the players would make more, but there just isn’t as much interest. Similar to how the Canadian football league (CFL) players make a fraction of what the NFL players make.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Fifa sells the commercial rights to showing international football as a package. Men and women games together as the deal.

They don’t split the revenue by gender when they distribute funds to the various Football Associations to be awarded to the players, but the FA’s still pay the men more.

Although, obviously the mens games are more popular with the fans, the money was made before the matches are played by selling the men *and* women games together.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Increasing the percentage wouldn’t be unfair to the males… equal pay is protected by gender, not profit margin.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In simple terms, people are less willing to pay to watch live, pay for watching on cable, advertise during and sponsor women’s football/soccer. The vast difference in revenue is down to advertising, sponsoring and broadcasting rights. The simple but politically incorrect reason is the women’s football is not as exciting to watch as men’s football. Having watched the recent World Cup, I have to agree. Less spectacular goals, slower pace, a very high amount of missed passes and so on. Basically in cold hard business terms the women have mid range B brand business at the top their market but are upset that a premier brand that does ok earns more money. It’s simply the market at work, not discrimination. But they have decided that this is unfair and they should earn the same despite making far lower revenue figures. But as long as an amateur under 18 boys team can beat a women’s pro national team by a fair margin, there’s just no way their games are worth that much money,

The opposite side is fashion models where women get paid 8-20x more than men. The top earning female fashion model in 2018 earned more by herself than the entire top ten of Male models combined. For the same reasons, female models get a way more advertising revenue than men. But of course no calls for equality here.

Anonymous 0 Comments

National sports teams are tricky from a labor economics perspective because they’re essentially side-jobs for their workers. This means that a key determinant of how people are paid is what they’re paid at their regular jobs.

Essentially, US Soccer wants to attract top talent to its teams, and it wants to pay the minimum possible to do so. It will typically cost more to get a player making $1,000,000 on their club team than to get a player making $100,000, even if those players ultimately generate the same revenue for the national team. Players weigh the costs and benefits of playing for the national team, and those with more to lose (especially from the added risk of injury) will want a higher salary to play. Thus, because female players have a lower earning potential in club play, they can be enticed onto the national team for less money.

The players speaking out about it is just an ordinary labor dispute. They believe (with pretty good reason) that they’re being underpaid, so they’re making a stink about it. They’d have better luck if they were making credible threats to not play for US Soccer in the future until this was fixed.

Lastly, there’s nothing in labor economics that guarantees wages will be set in a “fair” way, but at the same time, we have many laws and mores in place to help steer them in that direction. In that sense, the public also have a right to put pressure on US Soccer to change how they pay athletes. You also have a right to believe that these changes would reduce fairness. Unfortunately, there’s no consistent economic definition of the concept.