Originally published by Jeff Haden on LinkedIn: Women Clearly Don't Deserve Equal Pay: U.S. Women's Soccer Team Wage Discrimination Lawsuit
Pretend you're a female salesperson and you generate more revenue for your employer than a male counterpart. And then pretend that if you hit the top sales target for your position you can earn a bonus of $75,000... while your male counterpart can earn a bonus of $400,000.
Does that sound fair to you?
Of course not -- and that's why Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Hope Solo, Megan Rapinoeand Becky Sauerbrunn of the U.S. women's national soccer team filed a wage-discrimination action with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the U.S. Soccer Federation.
Citing figures from the Federation's financial report, the suit claims that even though the women's team generated almost $20 million more in revenue in 2015 than the men's team, the women earn approximately 25 percent of what their male counterparts make.
Granted, there are fundamental differences in pay structure between the men's and women's teams. While the men do not receive a base salary, top players on the women's team get a salary of around $72,000 a year in return for playing a minimum of 20 games a year. So some of their income is guaranteed.
If they win those games they can, due to bonuses, earn nearly $100,000. The men are also required to play at least 20 games a year, but they can earn up to approximately $260,00 if they win all their games.
But even if the men lose, they still get $5,000 for playing... while the women receive nothing.
Of course there are two sides to the story. You can argue that players on the men's team are offered higher bonuses as an incentive to participate; traveling to friendlies is at best difficult and at worst highly disruptive to training, recovery, etc.
And you can argue that offering the men more money is necessary because their club salaries tend to be relatively high. For example, imagine you're Tim Howard, you play for Everton in the English Premier League, and in 2014 your salary was $2.6 million. While the honor of playing for your country is considerable, you may not be super excited about taking a couple of trans-Atlantic flights to play, oh, Trinidad & Tobago in a meaningless friendly.
And here's possibly the biggest devil's advocate argument of all: the women agreed to the current deal. (Although their union is involved in a separate legal dispute over the status of that collectively bargained agreement: the Federation claims its contract with the player's association runs until the end of the year while the union feels the agreement can be terminated at any time.)