US Women’s Soccer World Cup Win Comes Despite Huge Inequalities

[niyad]

US Women’s Soccer World Cup Win Comes Despite Huge Inequalities


The United States’ women’s soccer team defeated Japan this weekend in an impressive and fast-paced game, bringing home the championship trophy for the first time in 16 years. But despite national and international celebration, disparities in coverage, respect, and pay still linger between women’s and men’s soccer teams.



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Even so, feminists have been noting the differences between coverage of last year’s men’s World Cup in Brazil and this year’s tournament in Canada. The months of in-depth coverage leading up to the men’s World Cup last year dramatically overshadows the limited coverage of the women’s cup, which mostly focused on the last two weeks of the tournament.

As Maggie Mertens wrote for the Atlantic, “The gender inequities in sports are just as vast as those faced by women in corporate offices and on movie sets, but for some reason they fail to incite the same level of outrage.” There is a massive pay gap between male and female professional athletes. In this tournament alone the ************US world champions of the women’s World Cup will earn collectively $15 million- a stark difference from the $576 million earned collectively by the US men’s team, who lost in the first round of the tournament last year.*********
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Indeed, Fox Sports- the primary United States carrier of the FIFA World Cup- had to expand its coverage of the tournament with 30 additional hours of programming, including expanded pre- and post-game coverage, due to unprecedented demand for coverage of this championship match. The increase in programming is promising, although we are far from parity; a new report by researchers from USC and Purdue University found that ESPN’s coverage of sports news through program SportsCenter only gave 2% airtime to women in 2014.

A group of more than 40 leading women’s soccer players have recently filed a lawsuit against FIFA for gender-based discrimination, specifically citing FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association (CSA) decisions to have the women’s tournament played on artificial turf as opposed to a grass field. Those filing the lawsuit call artificial turf an “inferior surface,” and cite the increased risk of injury and significant temperature difference on the field that artificial turf creates. In this World Cup, the artificial turf brought temperatures on the field to up to 120 degrees. Every men’s World Cup since 1930 has been played on natural grass, while most women’s World Cup matches, as well as the next six scheduled, are slated to be played on artificial turf.


http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2015/07/06/usa-womens-soccer-wins-despite-huge-inequalities/