--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this episode of Today Explained comes from KiwiCo. KiwiCo is for the children, but for the children of all ages. KiwiCo is offering Today Explained listeners the chance to try them out for free right now at KiwiCo.com slash explained. That's K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The U.S. women are having quite a World Cup. It was a day of record-setting domination on the world stage for the U.S. women. Is it going to be 13? It is. The emphatic victory for the U.S.A. They win by 13 goals to nil. The United States are through to the semifinal and France fall short yet again. You're heading to the World Cup final. How proud are you of this team? I mean, so proud. I'm not going to the fucking White House. No, I'm not going to the White House. We're not going to be invited. You're not going to be invited? I doubt it.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the team was making headlines months before the tournament even started. Today, in a stunning move on International Women's Day, all 28 members of the team filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation. The lawsuit alleges that U.S. soccer has been discriminating against the women's national team for a long time on an institutionalized basis, meaning sort of built into the way that U.S. soccer operates.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Hi, I'm Kaitlin Murray. I follow the team for a living, literally and figuratively. I'm in France right now and I've written a book about them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there are really two components to this lawsuit. There is the idea of equal pay and compensation, and that is the more complicated and more difficult part to understand. You know, the women are alleging that they are being paid less than the men. The women also negotiated for a different contract than the men where they get salaries, but the men are paid purely through bonuses. So what equal pay looks like is a little complicated.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: What isn't complicated are these non-compensation issues that come up in the lawsuit. Things like the men playing on natural grass, whereas the women have to play their games on artificial turf. And soccer players say that artificial turf is harder on their bodies and harder to recover from.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The men being flown on charter flights for their games, whereas the women have had to fly on commercial flights. And, you know, that being more of a burden for them to be able to compete at a high level. So I think the catchy thing that everyone has sort of glommed onto and have been talking about is this idea of equal pay. But like I said, it's sort of nuanced. It's sort of difficult to define what exactly equal pay looks like.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: What does the disparity between pay look like? Well, the way the women are kind of describing it is that more compensation overall is being made available to the men. We need to look at the way the youth teams are funded. We need to look at the way our staff, our coaching staff, our medical staff is funded. We need to look at promotion and branding and marketing and sponsorship, all of that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And until we do, until we have equity and equality of the men's and women's team on both those sides, we can't really say, oh, the men make this and the women make this. And even though the women get salaries, most of the players get around $100,000 each in salaries. Even with those salaries, their total compensation ends up being less than the men because the men get such massive bonuses.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: If each team played and won 20 non-tournament games a year, female players would earn a maximum of $99,000. While similarly ranked male players would earn an average of more than $260,000. The men can get up to $18,000 for winning a friendly game. The women can't earn anywhere near that if they win a game.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Their latest numbers are higher, but they are certainly nowhere near the men still. So what does the U.S. Soccer Federation have to say about these claims? Not only the money part, but the charter plane part, and especially the AstroTurf part, which what is the reasoning behind that? I can't imagine.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Well, the artificial turf, I think, is actually the most indefensible thing in the whole lawsuit because there's no actual reason to put the women on artificial turf while the men are on natural grass. Sometimes the men and women played at the same venues in the same year or two year span, and the Federation would actually pay to put temporary grass for the men, whereas the women didn't get that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But since this lawsuit has been filed, U.S. soccer has been scheduling all the women's games on natural grass. The Federation also says that the women are being flown on charter flights now. So they have gone ahead and addressed those issues. Because, like I said, the compensation piece is much more complicated. It's not a simple fix.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: It's not the Federation just changes something like they do with the flights and the plane surfaces and it's suddenly taken care of. What U.S. Soccer is arguing is two things. One is they're arguing that the men bring in more revenue and therefore they should be entitled to more compensation. Another piece of I think U.S. Soccer's response, at least in the response, official response to the lawsuit, they're saying that the men and women's teams are separate entities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which is frankly a little surprising because U.S. Soccer has this sort of tagline called one nation, one team. And yet in their lawsuit they arguing one nation two teams a men team and a women team. And I don't know how well that's going to hold up as a legal argument because these are two teams that do play for the same federation for the same boss and there's staff that works for the federation that, you know, works for both teams.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Do we know what the biggest streams of revenue are for the women's U.S. soccer team? And are those streams the same as the men? Is it ticket sales? Is it TV revenue? Is it merchandise?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, TV contracts are huge, but they're not broken out separately. They're bundled together. So we can assume and a lot of people have chosen to assume that the men are driving the value in those TV deals. But the head of Fox Sports in an interview recently, you know, was asked about that. And he said, it's hard to argue that the women's national team is not the bigger team right now in this country.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: It's the same with sponsorships. Those are not broken out separately. They're bundled together. And those are the biggest revenue streams. The other one is ticket sales. And the women have been bringing in more money from ticket sales for the last three years. Part of that is they play more games than the men's national team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The average attendance of a women's national team game is not as large as a men's national team game. But the women are playing more games. They're doing more promotion, more media. How does it feel to be going back now, going back to France, to defend your title?
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Well, we tried to retrace all the steps for good luck. So we got to come get the good juju from you, of course. I love it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think it's actually interesting that there's this idea of equal pay for equal work when actually the women, you could argue, are doing more work. And that could be an interesting precedent because there was actually a lawsuit in 1994 in California that serves as precedent where there was a women's basketball coach who sued because she wasn't being paid as much as the men's basketball coach.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: And what was ruled in the case was that the male coach had to do more work. He was doing more promotion. He had higher expectations, more pressure. And I think if you look at that precedent, that applies to the U.S. Women's National Team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, we went into this World Cup and everyone was talking about them winning again. Teams don't just win back-to-back World Cups all the time. It's actually an incredibly rare thing to do. It's happened once on the women's side. It's happened twice on the men's side ever.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: So I think, you know, it's interesting to talk about equal pay for equal work when the women have been doing so much more work for the past few years. Bringing it back to this lawsuit that's ongoing right now, if and when it's resolved, might that result in equal pay for what sounds like unequal work? I actually don't think that equal pay as we know it is possible because the women have negotiated a certain collective bargaining agreement, the men have negotiated a different collective bargaining agreement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They have different structures. The men are paid purely through bonuses. The women are paid salaries and bonuses. And the women have not indicated that they want a different compensation structure. They just want more compensation. So the overall pie that is available to them is as large as the men's team.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: So I think probably the biggest impact that this lawsuit will have, other than, you know, potentially a settlement that's worth a lot of money, I think it's going to force U.S. soccer to maybe reevaluate the way they've been doing things over the years and kind of looking at the treatment of the two teams and questioning, why are we doing things the way that we're doing them?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Should we reconsider how we're treating the two teams? Is there any reason for some of these differences we have between the two teams? I think that will actually be the bigger impact of this lawsuit, not so much this idea of equal pay.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Yeah, I mean, while we're reconsidering how things are done, is anyone proposing that they just pay the men less instead of paying the women more? It's not like they're winning or anything, right? I'm sure that argument is out there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't think the women are asking for that. I don't think U.S. soccer is considering that. Yeah, I think that in the past, when women have asked for equal pay, that's something that people say, oh, we're just going to pay the men less.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: I think with, you know, Title IX, when that was passed, that's the law that ensured that women would be given athletic scholarships that the men weren't. A lot of people thought that Title IX was going to mean that men's sports and colleges got less funding and less scholarships.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that, of course, didn't happen at all. All that happened was there were more scholarships for women and more resources for women's sports and colleges. So, you know, I'm sure there are some people who would talk about that being a possibility, but I just don't think that's how these things tend to go.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: You know, we've talked about equal pay on the show before, and a surprising thing we learned was that, like, yes, equal pay is an issue in the United States, but it's, you know, dramatically worse in other countries, even surprisingly countries where you hear about, you know, really comprehensive and sort of woke social programs like Denmark or Sweden or Switzerland.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wonder, how much better or worse is it outside the United States? Do you have any idea?
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Well, for instance, Norway has equal pay between their two teams. You know, Ada Hagerberg is arguably the best female soccer player in the world. She's not playing in this Women's World Cup because she argued that the Federation doesn't treat the women's team well enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because in the end, it's not about money either. It's all about attitude and respect for the sport. Women being treated equally as men.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Some countries, the women's team are treated terribly. We especially see, you know, in South America, a lot of these countries have such rich footballing cultures and they have players who are really good, but they're just treated terribly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, in CONCACAF, our region, you see Jamaica having to do a fundraiser in Florida to make money for their World Cup debut because their federation just doesn't support them.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: One thing we have seen is that the U.S. women's national team is the number one ranked team in the world. They are the reigning champions. And for them to be so public about fighting for equal pay and better treatment, I think that has served as inspiration to a lot of teams around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've sort of seen a wave of women's national teams standing up to their federation, boycotting, doing certain things to get attention and sort of raise these issues more publicly when for so long they were maybe a little more quiet and they were told, you know, you should just be happy to be on the national team.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: I think we've seen a lot more women's teams being willing to sort of push back against their federations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After the break, the crazy boom and bust history of U.S. women's soccer.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last week I spoke to a young man named Desmond about his love of KiwiCo. Desmond admitted that he also liked Lego, but he liked KiwiCo because he got to learn about stuff as he built stuff, and he also alluded to the fact that he keeps his KiwiCo projects once he's done with them because he loves them so much.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The projects are designed to spark creativity, tinkering, and learning in kids of all ages. All the projects and inspiration they do and the activities are created by a team of product designers in-house in Mountain View, California. And get this, they're rigorously tested by kids.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: KiwiCo sends you crates. Each crate includes all the supplies needed for that month's projects. Detailed, easy to follow instructions and an educational magazine to learn even more about that crate's theme to boot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: KiwiCo right now is offering Today Explained listeners the chance to try them out for free to redeem the offer. And learn more about their projects for kids of all ages, go to KiwiCo.com slash explained. K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, Caitlin, I mean, it's pretty obvious that women's soccer hasn't always been as popular as it is right now. When exactly did it become such a big thing in the United States?
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: I would say the first time it became really popular was in 1999. That, of course, was when the U.S. won the World Cup and the Rose Bowl in California.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For the second time, the United States has won the Women's World Cup. And Brandi Chastain gets the game run of the pick kick. She was so cool and composed, and she comes up and approaches it with her left foot and sends it into the side netting, and no keeper in the world was going to save that kick.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Brandi Chastain rips off her shirt, she's on the cover of Sports Illustrated in her sports bra, and America just sort of fell in love with the team, and they, you know, became celebrities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mia Hamm was a genuine star. Two Olympic gold medals. Two-time FIFA Women's Soccer Player of the Year. Two Women's World Cup medals. Three-time U.S. Soccer Player of the Year. I am the all-time leading scorer of international soccer, male or female.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: I'm trying to think what else I've won. I have won zero bake sales.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What happens next for U.S. women's soccer? There was a group of people and investors who decided to start the first women's league in the United States. And they were hoping that they could capitalize on the momentum that they saw at the 1999 Women's World Cup.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: And that league was called the WUSA. You just have a mix of the best that want to play in this league because they know how good it's going to be. And so it really will be the world's best professional league for women's soccer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, it was the women's equivalent to MLS, Major League Soccer. Of course, in 1999, they actually fought with MLS a lot because MLS at the time was hemorrhaging money and they were afraid that they were going to fold.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: And the women had all this momentum and excitement around them. So MLS actually, at least, you know, the people involved in the WSA, the way they tell it is MLS did everything they could to try to kill this women's league because they were scared that the women's league was actually going to take away all their audience and their sponsors and their market share.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow. But yes, the answer to your question is that yes, it was the women's counterpart to MLS. How does it go? Not great I think that there was an expectation that the people who tune into World Cups were going to be the people who are going to tune in to watch local teams every week.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: And unfortunately, that just didn't happen. They just pulled the plug after three seasons and the league folded. And people were not really caring about the team that much anymore until 2011.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It has been a huge, wholehearted effort from the States. Abby Wambach scored the latest goal in World Cup history in just sort of an insane game. Rapinoe. Wambach! 2-2! That's what you call USA razzle-dazzle!
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: It was the quarterfinal against Brazil. Wambach rises, plants the header. What a finish! We are set for penalties! It was an incredibly dramatic match, and that sort of won over Americans who weren't really paying that much attention to the Women's World Cup.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And ever since 2011, I think women's soccer has been relatively popular. And then after the team won the World Cup in 2015 in Canada, it just exploded.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Was there a similar sort of surge of investment after that win? So in 2015, there was already a league that had started called the NWSL. That league actually still exists. It's the longest running women's soccer league in the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's in its seventh season right now. You did see more investment, more sponsors. I think it was less than some people might have hoped. And I think, again, after this World Cup in 2019, again, there's going to be more interest. There's going to be more sponsors.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: I think the team is more popular now than they've ever been before. And we're seeing in this World Cup, I was actually shocked that Fox said their TV ratings through the World Cup so far was higher than it was four years ago in 2015.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that surprises me because Canada is in the same time zone, of course, as the U.S. Whereas in France, you know, back in the U.S., these games are airing, you know, early in the morning or in the afternoon. And yet the ratings have been higher. The team is just more popular. People are more excited about this team than maybe ever, except for maybe 1999.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: I think the NWSL needs to sort of figure out its front office operations. It needs to be in a position to capture the inevitable interest that is going to come after this Women's World Cup in France is over.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Would a more successful women's soccer league in the United States make this equal pay situation for the national team sort of like a non-starter? I mean, the reason the men get bonuses and not salaries is because they make a ton of money playing for their clubs.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: They actually don't even need to make any money from the national team, if we're being honest. These are players that make very good salaries, whether they're playing in MLS or any of the tons of men's leagues that exist around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those opportunities aren't available to the women. That is why they need the U.S. Soccer Federation to pay them salaries. So that should be the goal. I think everyone would love to see women's soccer get in a place where there are viable leagues and clubs where they can pay salaries for the players.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: But that's still a long ways away. I mean, women's soccer was banned in Brazil until 1979, which is not that long ago. So of course that infrastructure doesn't exist there. In England, women's soccer was banned until the 1970s as well, but like it was banned around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's not surprising that the infrastructure in women's soccer has lagged behind men's soccer. Women legally could not play soccer for a really long time.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Why was women's soccer banned? I think it was considered inappropriate for women to play soccer. But I think we can just sort of sum it up by saying they were sexist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, tale as old as time. People are sexist. Why are men so threatened by women who kick balls? No comment.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: I don't know how to answer that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Caitlin Murray is the author of The National Team, the inside story of the women who changed soccer. I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The show's executive producer is Irene Noguchi, Bridget McCarthy, Amina Al-Sadi, Halima Shah, and Noam Hassenfeld produce, Afim Shapiro is the engineer, and our summer interns are Alex Pena and Will Reed.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Jared Paul pitched in yesterday, and the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder is minding the net.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we are a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to KiwiCo for supporting the show today. KiwiCo right now wants you to try them out for free, or at least like the young person you know, as long as you like building stuff and learning stuff and feeling empowered.
--:-- Kaitlin Murray: Who are we kidding? KiwiCo.com slash explained is the website to visit. K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash explained.
