Gender wage gap has been a constant and prominent issue across various industries for multiple decades now. Thus, the U.S women’s football team, despite its consistent number one ranking, is not immune to this problem. As a result of the stark difference in the pay between the two teams, five of the biggest names of the established U.S women’s football team filed a complaint against the U.S Soccer Federation to revolt against this discrimination. Similarly, the US women’s hockey team attempted a boycott to strive for equal wages. However, the wage gap remains prevalent even today, almost discounting the protests of various women teams.
While a few sports have been able to reduce or almost eradicate the disparity in the wage gap, most sports still display an appalling difference in the wages offered to male and female athletes. These offenders include cricket, golf, squash, tennis and the most notorious of them all, football. To cite a few football examples, Cristiano Ronaldo, the world’s highest paid athlete is known to bag more that $88 million whereas, Alex Morgan, the highest paid female football player, has earnings of about $2.8 million. In the 2014 World Cup, the winning US women’s football team earned a substantially lesser amount ($1.8 million bonus to be distributed amongst 23 players) than the US men’s football team ($8 million to be shared amongst the players) which got kicked out before even clearing the quarter finals. Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which is the main decider of the prize money in both the World Cups (men’s and women’s) allocated a whopping $576 million for the men’s tournament and a relatively meagre $15 million for the women’s World Cup- an amount that is almost 40 times smaller. It would be a grave mistake if the women’s team were to tolerate this injustice with their lips sealed.
Similar wage gaps are witnessed across various professional sports. In golf, New Zealand’s Lydia Ko became the youngest player of either gender to be ranked number one in 2015. However, she still pocketed less money than the golfer in position 25th in the male ranking of the PGA Tour. Men in the US Open compete for a chance to take home almost $1.5m (£1.1m), twice as much the prize money offered to the female champion. The ridiculous wage gap extends to big leagues in basketball as well, where the highest-paid player in the Women’s National Basketball Association makes roughly one-fifth that of the lowest-paid player in the Men’s National Basketball Association.
Although, there have been few initiatives such as the Grand Slams of Tennis (the four most important events in the global calendar) introduced equal pay for men and women in 2007, they have most often gotten lost in the vast sea of unequal pay for women who play the sport equally well if not better than their male counterparts. The injustice is not restricted to just the pay but also the limited amount of exposure given to these athletes, as well as the sexist comments that they have to face. We could tell ourselves that this gap is rapidly reducing across sports, but then we would be labouring under a fantastic delusion. Women have only yet touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of opportunities in sports and it’s going to take very long before we achieve equal pay for them if we continue to remain satisfied with this pace of progress.
Hutt, Rosamond. “Sport Has a Huge Gender Pay Gap – and It’s Not about to Close Soon.” World Economic Forum, http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/sport-has-a-huge-gender-pay-gap-and-it-s-not-about-to-close-soon/.
Perasso, Valeria. “100 Women: Is the Gender Pay Gap in Sport Really Closing?” BBC News, BBC, 23 Oct. 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-41685042.
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