Last month President Joe Biden welcomed motor-mouth, National Anthem-kneeling women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe to the White House to commemorate “Equal Pay Day.”
This event purported to call attention to the “fact” that women make less than men. For years the figure cited was 23 cents on the dollar less for women, although for this year’s event it’s now been narrowed to 18 cents.
Rapinoe and other members of the U.S. Women’s National Team have complained for years that despite their repeated World Cup victories – compared to the American men, who have none – the men’s team still makes more money.
During her trip to Washington, Rapinoe said, “Despite all of the wins, I’m still paid less than men who do the same job as I do. I know there are millions of people who are marginalized by gender in the world and experience the same thing in their jobs.”
She added when with Biden, “Despite those wins. I’ve been devalued, I’ve been disrespected and dismissed because I’m a woman. And I’ve been told that I don’t deserve any more than less, because I am a woman.”
In the macro sense – if you add up everything that men and women make separately, and look at the difference – the “gap” might be true. But the devil, as always, is in the details.
As Forbes columnist Evan Gerstmann wrote in June 2019, “When comparing two people in the same profession, with the same seniority, working the same number of hours, and so forth, women earn $0.98 for every dollar that a man earns.”
Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute also has argued that the accepted number is flawed. She has noted those claiming discrimination don’t consider that the “gap” is caused by “differences in occupation, positions, education, job tenure, hours worked per week.” Factor in those, she adds, and “the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.”
To reinforce that point, Hoff Sommers noted in 2018 that if it were true that women make 23 cents less on average, “Why wouldn’t businesses only hire women? Wages are the biggest expense for most businesses. So, hiring only women would reduce costs by nearly a quarter — and that would go right to the bottom line.”
Still, the Biden administration has proven impervious to facts. And Equal Pay Day showed that.
Alongside Rapinoe, Biden declared, “The pay gap is real, and this team is living proof that you can be the very best at what you do and still have to fight for equal pay.”
Accepting all this from Biden, Rapinoe and others specific to the soccer teams means you’re missing some useful facts.
In her comments, Rapinoe referenced a lawsuit filed against U.S. Soccer by the women’s team over pay discrimination.
“This was the next step we had to take, frankly. I don’t think anyone wants to go into litigation willingly; it’s not a fun thing. But we felt like for our team and future of our sport, this is what we had to do,” she said.
What she left out was that a judge tossed out their lawsuit last year. As the Associated Press noted, the judge ruled “the women rejected a pay-to-play structure similar to the one in the men’s agreement and accepted greater base salaries and benefits than the men.” They also agreed to have more women under contract than men.
In other words, Rapinoe and the rest could have taken the same deal as men, and rolled the dice on the risk and the rewards, but chose not to. As the judge wrote in his ruling, the women’s team cannot claim their deal, and accordingly, their pay, was worse “when they themselves rejected such a structure.”
But Rapinoe and the other women also don’t want to admit another problem they face: their game just isn’t that popular.
CBS News in 2015, for instance, took a look back when this issue came up after the 2014 World Cup. CBS pointed out that in 2010 the Women’s World Cup brought in almost $73 million.
Meanwhile, “The 2010 Men’s World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion.”
The women’s team last week appealed the judge’s decision to toss their case. They’re taking their case to the federal appellate court over California, the most liberal in the nation. Which means they stand a good chance of prevailing.
But if they do, the appeals court will inject politics into this issue and will reward Rapinoe and the rest for their own awful decision-making.
Let it be remembered that a group of 9th grade students defeated the vaunted soccer team