Feb. 5 marks National Girls and Women in Sports Day, and I’m celebrating the only way I know how. I’ll be telling you about some bad*ss women who generated a lot of conversation in the media.
On March 8, 2019, it was announced that 28 members of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team had sued the soccer federation due to pay and working conditions. The teammates filed a gender discrimination lawsuit for “institutionalized gender discrimination,” as quoted in the file statement. This not only affected the pay of the women, but also the coaching, medical care, training and even travel to and from matches. Some of the star players involved in the lawsuit are Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan and Carli Lloyd.
The women’s soccer players made it clear that they play more games than the men’s league and that they win more, yet they don’t get paid as much as men players from the same federation.
Seriously.
The women’s team has excelled in their sport for decades: winning three world championships and placing gold in four Olympics. They were private at first about wanting higher pay and fair treatment. But when the soccer federation did not comply with their requests, the 28 women took it to court.
The women of the United States soccer team had social media swarming with conversation after the news of the filed suit. From Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., women and men alike were appalled by the fact that the women’s team was a statistic of unequal pay. Not only was the team doing the same job as their male counterparts, but also they were more than qualified by winning more games and having more ratings in the U.S. compared to the male players. Hopefully in the upcoming months of this year, we will see a change since Judge R. Gary Klausner of the United States District Court for the Central District of California has set the date of trial to May of 2020.
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