What defines our pay scale? Our jobs, the way we work, who we are? More often than not, it’s the sad fact that who we are can define our pay scale more than what we do. This is the most evident in the startling revelation that the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team are victims of the gender pay gap. And why? Because women’s sports are the butt of most people’s jokes? Because they only play soccer well “for a girl”? This may seem like a lot of questions but these questions are important to ask when there seems to be so few answers. Though the most important question to me is: why is this still an issue?
The women’s team notes that they have won more championships and generated more revenue than the men’s team yet only get paid a quarter of what the men’s team makes. They’ve more than proven their worth, but to me they shouldn’t need to prove their worth at all. At the root of it, it seems that women are assumed to be less proficient than men in sports as well as other high pressure fields like engineering, finance, or law firms. While some women have been able to break the glass ceiling, there still remains a lack of respect.
Playing a professional sport is difficult, playing at the level of a champion takes time, effort, skill, and talent. In any other sport, this talent would be compensated with money; and while the Women’s Team is told they should feel lucky they get paid to play at all, the men’s team is sitting on a less successful record and a bigger paycheck. This not only seems unfair it seems implausible. The American Dream would be that people who work hard will get compensated fairly, and be able to make a better life for themselves regardless of their background. The Women’s National team is being denied this on the basis of their gender, but hopefully their case will not go on in vain.
By bringing this wage-discrimination to the forefront of the public’s mind, I am optimistic that this will make people understand that a woman cannot make more money by simply changing their major from dance to engineering (as one kind person on Facebook suggested), but that this is a larger infrastructural problem about the way we see women’s role in society. We teach our daughters today that they can do anything a guy can do, we have made campaigns happen that try and uplift women by showing them throwing like a girl is a good thing, yet until men and women can get equal pay for the same job – or even higher pay when women are doing a better job – these campaigns seem to be making false promises.
But maybe I’m just writing like a girl.
Alyx Eva is a senior majoring in American studies and English. Her column runs biweekly.
