The U.S. Women's Soccer Team Just Won Equal Pay--Cue the Misogynist Backlash

[niyad]

The U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Just Won Equal Pay—Cue the Misogynist Backlash
6/7/2022 by Susan Shaw
It seems a number of men on the internet are outraged by the suggestion that women athletes might be deserving of equal pay.


United States fans hold up an equal pay sign in game action during an international friendly match between the United States woman’s national team and the New Zealand women’s national team on May 16, 2019, at Busch Stadium, in St. Louis, Mo. (Robin Alam / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Last month, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team (USWNT) announced a deal that guarantees women and men who play for the national teams will receive the same compensation opportunities. The USWNT has been agitating for equal pay for the last six years, as have fans. (During the 2019 World Cup, after the women’s team’s won fourth World Cup victory, the stadium erupted with chants for “equal pay! Equal pay!”) While feminists and other USWNT fans celebrated the decision, not unexpectedly, misogynists came roaring back with cries of “Unfair!” “Wokeness!” “Biology!” The comments on the New York Times and Washington Post articles announcing the agreement and on Twitter are enlightening. According to these misogynists, women soccer players (and other athletes, particularly in the WNBA and tennis) do not deserve equal pay because:

they are biologically inferior, and therefore their games are not as good as the men’s; and
the men, who are biologically better athletes, generate more revenue because they are more exciting to watch and therefore that revenue should stay with them.

Equal Pay for Unequal Work?

. . . . .

The argument that women’s work in sports is not equal work was widespread. One person made the connection to a larger misogyny apparent:

“It’s not about equal pay for equal work. It’s equal pay for men and women, no matter what they actually produce. Women don’t need to compete directly with men on the same field, they just need to be better than other women. I think the same principle is desired for all fields, medicine, law, engineering, the best women should get the same pay as the best men, even if they aren’t able to do the job as well, they just need to be better than other women. “Keep that in mind the next time you hire a woman.”

. . . . . .



Networks don’t televise women’s sports and argue people don’t watch. But, surprise, surprise, televise women athletes, and people do tune in. And when people tune in, major sponsors line up to buy advertising and generate revenue—Disney, Apple, AT&T and General Motors, to name just a few. And, as the Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins argues, the NCAA’s treatment of women athletes is a “shell game.” Until this year, the women couldn’t call their tournament “March Madness” and so missed out on the inevitable revenue generation that moniker allows. Then the NCAA uses an utterly opaque bookkeeping process that obscures how much women athletes really do generate. So, no, Merlin, it’s really not a matter of men being better athletes. It’s about men believing men are better athletes—then conspiring to make it so.

. . . .




In a couple of weeks when we’ve seen the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade, the cover-up of the sex abuse scandal among Southern Baptists, and two mass shootings by young men, debate over women’s soccer may seem like small potatoes. Yet, the misogynistic messages make clear that all of these events are of a piece—they all abundantly underscore the current moment’s backlash against feminist progress. Whether the issue is equal pay, reproductive justice, freedom from sexual violence, or safety in the grocery store, school or house of worship, women across our differences are facing renewed attack.



https://msmagazine.com/2022/06/07/us-womens-soccer-team-equal-pay-sexism-social-media/