Women's Soccer, Pay Equality and Pandering
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The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team have been making headlines in recent weeks not only for their soccer dominance and winning the World Cup, but also for their call for “equal pay”. You see, the U.S. Women’s team is allegedly paid less than the much less successful U.S. Men’s team and are currently in a legal battle with the U.S. Soccer Federation over wage equality.
The U.S. Women’s on-field success has been translated into righteousness by the media in the wage equality discussion. The media, ESPN in particular, have uncritically accepted the premise that the Women’s team deserves to be paid the same as the men’s team. On every single ESPN “debate” show, such as Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn, all of the media talking heads supported the women’s demand for equal pay, which did not make for much debate but did allow for a great deal of virtue signaling.
An example of the establishment media’s perspective on this issue was on full display in two Boston Globe op-eds printed this week. In one, written by Shirley Leung with a headline imploring US Soccer to “Get on the right side of history!”, she states, “Of course the women should be paid as much as the men. If anything they should get MORE.”
In another Boston Globe article, this one by Tara Sullivan titled After Winning the World Cup, How Can the US Women Be Denied Their Well-Deserved Due?, Sullivan writes, “That they emerged as victorious on the pitch while simultaneously carrying a torch for pay equity IN THE BOARDROOM only underscores what tough competitors they are…” (emphasis mine).
Both Leung and Sullivan and the cavalcade of sportswriters on ESPN’s debate shows, were not partaking in a serious journalistic examination of the issue of pay equality for women’s soccer players, rather they were simply doing what most public people do in our woke culture…pandering.
In our current age of political correctness no one on TV or writing in a major newspaper is going to declare that the US Women’s soccer team does not deserve equal pay. Nor will they argue that the Women’s team is actually getting paid equally because members of the women’s team get a guaranteed salary whereas the men’s team has a play to pay agreement. ESPN has become an HR department propaganda channel and pander parade with all of their painfully obvious woke posing and preening. Every single one of the guests on that network know that if they even hint at being against some woke initiative, they will lose their place at the network.
Now it is certainly possible to argue for equal pay without pandering, but what the ESPN people and the vast majority of mainstream writers did was not make a logical case for equal pay, but rather an emotional one. In Sullivan’s Globe piece she quotes Amory McAndrew, a lawyer who specializes in employment law at a “women-owned law firm” that specializes in employment law, who states “How could anyone now argue the US women’s soccer team is not performing equal work?” I know McAndrew seems like a stellar impartial voice (eye roll), but is it really inconceivable to think that the US women’s team is not doing equal work with the men’s team?
Let us first acknowledge that there are jobs where there is rightful pay inequality based on gender. Modeling is a perfect example of this as on average rank and file female models make 148% more money per year than male models. At the top end of the modeling business the contrast is even more striking as the highest paid female model, Gisele Bundchen made $47 million in 2014 while the top male model, Sean O’Pry made around $1.5 million. The reason that female models make so much more than men is because the majority of fashion advertising is geared towards women, thus female models have more value. That doesn’t mean male models have no value, just less value than female models.
In terms of the women’s soccer team issue what is really at stake is the value of female soccer players versus male soccer players. Supporters of the women’s team claim that the female players are of equal value to the male players.
In Leung’s article she claims the women deserve equal pay (in other words have equal value) because they “win more championships, sell more jerseys, and generate more revenue than the men’s squad.” This is a very deceptive argument as yes, they have won more championships, but winning in a World Cup in women’s soccer is considerably easier since the competition only began in 1991 and other nations do not have the female sport infrastructure that the U.S. does. In terms of jersey sales and revenue, it is true that the women’s team has brought in one million more dollars in revenue over the last three years…but only over the last three years, and that was when they were playing in a World Cup and the men were not.
I would argue that comparing the pay for women’s and men’s soccer teams is like comparing male and female models, as they are very different and appeal to very different sized audiences. For example, the prize money in the Women’s World Cup of 2019 was $30 million with $4 million going to the winning team, whereas in the Men’s World Cup of 2018 the prize money was $400 million total with $38 million going to the winning team. This may seem like an obvious case of gender bias until you look at the bigger picture, which is that the revenue from the 2019 Women’s World Cup was $130 million and the revenue from the Men’s 2018 World Cup was $6 BILLION. Men’s soccer is without question the big money maker across the globe and to deny this is to deny reality. Another example to hit this point home is that over the course of the entire 2019 Women’s World Cup tournament, 1 billion viewers tuned in…whereas in the 2018 Men’s World Cup, 1 billion viewers tuned in JUST FOR THE FINAL GAME.
Sports is, in general, something marketed toward men, while fashion is something marketed toward women, and this is why female athletes make less than men and females models make more than male models. To be clear, this is not to say that women’s sports in general, or women’s soccer, in particular, have no value, only that they have less value than men’s sports.
Besides the insipid pandering, what really bothers me about the US Women’s soccer team and their cry for equal pay is that it undermines the argument for equal pay for women with “regular” jobs. To be clear, I believe that people doing the same jobs should be paid equally regardless of gender. Anyone who thinks that women should be paid less for doing the exact same work as men is obviously a hopeless neanderthal and troglodyte. That said, while the U.S. Women’s soccer team is certainly generating a great amount of attention for the wage equality cause, I think they are ultimately the worst case to represent the issue. The problem I have with the women’s soccer team and equal pay is that unlike the women working “regular” jobs in offices, like an accountant, lawyer, writer etc., who are being paid less even though they are just as intellectually able as their male counterparts doing the same work, women’s soccer players are not the equals of their male counterparts. Yes, I know that is a shocking thing to say, especially in our current media environment and woke culture, but it is true and it is a sign of our cultural and intellectual decay that speaking this truth is considered an irredeemable sin.
As Shirley Leung writes in the Boston Globe, “When women are paid less than men for doing what appear to be similar jobs, why do employers insist on changing the playing field instead of leveling it", the statement “appear to be similar jobs” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Leung is, just like Sullivan and the rest of the media, conflating playing soccer with pursuits based on intellect…such as accounting, or legal work or any other office jobs. This is a fatal error by equal pay advocates, because when you conflate equality in the boardroom with equality on a soccer field, you are taking on two undefeated and undefeatable opponents…biology and reality. In a boardroom setting there is no scientific or biological reason for men to be superior to women…none. On a soccer field, there are dozens of reasons that women are inferior to men.
Leung states in her piece that the US women’s struggle for equal pay reminds her of the case of Elizabeth Rowe, a principal flutist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra who sued the company in order to get paid as much as the principal oboist who was a man. The problem with this comparison is that, unlike the women and men’s soccer teams, the flutist and oboist play at the same time on the same stage…in other words they are equals. Another problem is that unlike in athletics, in music there is no scientific basis for male superiority compared to females. Leung even states that orchestras do blind auditions in order to halt any unconscious bias on the part of the auditors who are left only to judge on the music created not on the gender of the creator. This is a wonderful idea…but how does Ms. Leung think it would go if soccer could be judged the same way? I’ll tell her how it would go…not well for the women.
On the most basic level the painful reality is that men are vastly superior to women in sport. This is an obvious truth but apparently it needs repeating because no one seems to want to admit this uncomfortable fact in regards to the US women’s soccer team. How much more superior are men than women is sport? Well…according to a study, in terms of speed and endurance, the best male athletes are in general 10% better than female athletes. The study is pretty interesting as it shows over history how in track and field running events men’s records consistently go towards the mean for being 10% faster than women’s records.
To show the stark contrast between men and women in regards to speed, this past year a high school runner from Texas set the high school record in the 100m at 9.98 seconds. This 18 year old boy ran the 100 meters a full half second faster than the women’s world record of 10.49 which was set in 1988 by Florence Griffith-Joyner.
Speed is not the only place where men dominate women, as studies have shown that on average men have 40% more upper body strength and 33% more lower body strength. Men are also, on average, much bigger in terms of weight and height than women, but studies show that height and weight difference only account for half of the strength difference. Male strength can be attributed to a larger cross section in individual muscle-fibers. Men’s grip strength is so overwhelmingly superior to women’s that in one study 90% of the women scored lower than 95% of the men.
I recently saw a story that claimed that the US women’s soccer team lost to an FC Dallas Under 15 boys academy team 5-2 in 2017. Many have discounted this story and claim that the women weren’t trying in the game which was a scrimmage. While the story of a “loss” may be a bit dubious, that doesn’t change the fact that it is certainly possible for that to have happened when you consider the biological differences between men and women…see the Texas high school kid who crushed the women’s world record 100m time by half a second.
If the World Cup winning US women’s soccer team played any of the top 50 ranked boys high school or club teams in America they would lose handily. The same is true of the US Women’s Olympic basketball team which is an absolute juggernaut filled with the very best female players in the world. If they played any of the top 100 high school boys basketball teams in America they would lose (especially if they had to play with a boy’s basketball and not the girl’s ball which is smaller).
A few years ago Rhonda Rousey was all the rage as she dominated women’s mixed martial arts. Rousey was submitting her opponents in record time in match after match and the media quickly grabbed hold of the story and made claims that she could beat men. Even male fighters got into the pandering game and claimed they wouldn’t want to fight Rousey…she even appeared on an episode of Entoruage to beat up one of the douchebags on that awful show. But I knew this was all nonsense, I guarantee that if Rousey fought any of the top 1,000 male MMA fighters of her same weight she would not survive a single round. The reason is that even at the same weight, men would generate considerably more power with their punches due to bone density and muscle mass. Women who try and physically match up with men are in for a rude awakening…real life is not a Hollywood movie where Brie Larson kicks ass…real life hurts when someone 40% stronger than you, with astronomically greater grip strength, grabs you and punches you in the face. Of course, Rousey proved herself to be a paper tiger when she got her head kicked in by Holly Holm and was never the same, only fighting once more a year later and getting ko’d 48 seconds into the first round by Amanda Nunes.
A few years ago John McEnroe made the mistake of stating the obvious when he said that if Serena Williams played on the men’s tour she would be ranked around 700 or so. People freaked out and got really mad at McEnroe for his claim, but that is usually what happens when bubbles are burst by reality. In 1998 both Venus and Serena Williams took on the 203rd ranked player in the world, German Karsten Braasch, in an exhibition after they challenged him. Braasch drank beer and smoked cigarettes during the change overs and was described as “no longer looking the part of an athlete”, but that didn’t stop him from beating first Serena 6-1 and then Venus 6-2. Serena went on to win the U.S. Open the next year and Venus won Wimbledon and the US Open the year after that. If you take men’s speed, endurance and strength advantages into account, it would seem likely that Serena Williams, maybe the greatest female tennis player of all-time, would not win a single set from any of the top 300 players on tour and would not win a single match against the top 1000 men in the world.
What does male physical dominance, Serena Williams and Ronda Rousey have to do with pay equality? The same thing Women’s soccer has to do with pay equality…absolutely nothing. Men have no intellectual advantages over women, and so women deserve to be paid equally for equal work based on intellect. The US women’s soccer team are not equals to their male counterparts though…they are vastly inferior and that is why they make for terrible avatars in this pay equality debate.
If women athletes want to paid the same as male athletes, let them compete against the men. Of course, they won’t do that because they are smart enough to know they would get obliterated in every sport where speed, power and strength are vital for success. This fact is made clear in the cases of male to female transgender athletes competing in women’s or girl’s sports, where they dominate, much to the chagrin of the female athletes and their families.
The bottom line is this, that the women’s soccer team isn’t nearly as good as the men’s soccer team, nor is women’s soccer anywhere near as popular as men’s soccer, even in the U.S. where MLS ratings and attendance are gargantuan compared to the ratings/attendance for NWSL (the women’s pro league). To deny these things is to deny observable and biological reality, and denying reality never lasts long or ends well.
in conclusion, women undoubtedly deserve equal pay for equal work, but the women’s soccer team is not equal to the men’s soccer team, not even close. To say other wise is to either live in delusion and fantasy or to participate in the most insidious of woke pandering, neither of which is a healthy or productive choice. If women want pay equality they should highlight the jobs where their gender differences do not put them at a decided disadvantage against men. Women should be paid equally in the board room where they are equals, but not on the athletic field, where they are not now, and never will be, equals.
©2019