Petition Asking FIFA To Pay Women Players Fairly After World Cup Ends
Soccer News: Sunday evening, after 16 years, the United States Women’s National Team became World Champions for the third time. Many records were broken that night: this finals saw the most goals scored in Women’s World Cup history, the USWNT became the first to be World Champions three times, and a record 25.4 million viewers tuned in, according to Nielsen ratings data—that is significantly more than the US vs. Portugal match in the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and the NBA finals.
But despite the impressive performance from the USWNT, and the other national women’s soccer teams, FIFA only paid the World Champions only $2 million—$7 million less than the award for the men’s team who lost in the second round. The total prize money for the 2015 Women’s World Cup increased by 50% from $10 million to $15 million—40 times less than the total payout for the 2014 Men’s World Cup where the total prize money was $576 million.
The world has seen and embraced the potential women’s soccer has to offer—it has called for action against the gender pay discrimination. Ultraviolet, an advocacy group for equal rights for women has created a petition asking FIFA to end its gender pay discrimination and pay the women’s team fairly. This has been one of the most successful campaigns for Ultraviolet as they received 60,000 signatures in the first 24 hours of the campaign.
Many have shared the petition on social media sites. It has reached the attention of both high profile leaders and athletes. Golden Glove winner, Hope Solo tweeted about the pay discrimination as she shared a picture of a fan holding a sign saying “Equal Pay 4 Athletes.” New York Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney has also joined the efforts to pressure FIFA to end this gender discrimination. On her website, a copy of the letter the Congresswoman wrote to former FIFA President Sepp Blatter is included in a press release. In it, she asks him to “reconsider and revise FIFA’s discriminatory policy which pays male and female players unequally.” She calls out the dissonance between FIFA’s goals, as listed on its website, and their actions.
She goes on to write, “the top priority for the 177 member associations surveyed is to increase the overall number of women and girls playing football. The second most cited priority is player development. It is hard to see how FIFA can accomplish either of these goals if the winning team of the Women’s World Cup is paid four times less than a men’s team that fails to make it past a tournament’s first round.”
The association has long had a rather discriminatory relationship with women’s soccer. Despite labeling himself as the “godfather of women’s soccer”, Blatter made sexist remarks. In 2004, he famously suggested that women’s soccer popularity could be increased if female athletes were to play in more feminine clothes and “tighter shorts”. In a press conference in 2004, Secretary General Jerome Valcke stated that the Women’s World Cup hasn’t been played for as long as the men’s and thus, are paid less. “The comparison between the prize money of the men’s World Cup in Brazil to the women’s World Cup in Canada, that’s not even a question I will answer because it is nonsense,” Valcke said. “We played 30th (men’s) World Cup in 2014 and we are playing the seventh women’s World Cup so things can grow step-by-step. We are still another 23 World Cups before potentially women should receive the same amount as men.”
Historically, women have been paid less. However, that does not mean that women, or society for that matter, need to grow accustomed to this and accept it as fact. Other sports have already started to improve their policies by removing gender discriminatory policies.
Tennis has led the way in breaking down the gender pay gap. Then President of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), Stacey Allaster helped secure equal pay for both male and female tennis players. Since 2007, the prize money at Grand Slam tournaments has been equal for all athletes—male and female.
With the changes that are to come following the corruption scandal, the association could certainly benefit from a change in its relationship with women’s soccer. FIFA ought to follow the WTA and begin to reward female soccer players the award they rightly deserve.
