Critics are up in arms about the World Cup gender gap. The prize money for women is far
less than for men. Commentators attribute the gap to sexism and what some call the grass ceiling.
Could they be right? Let’s review the evidence. Coming up next on the Factual Feminist.
This summer, the U.S. women’s soccer team electrified the nation when it defeated Germany 2–0
and then Japan 5–2 to win the World Cup. Instead of celebrating the team’s brilliant
play and the continuing growth of women’s soccer, many in the media are fixating on
what they see as a shameful “World Cup pay gap.” The U.S. women’s team collected
only $2 million in prize money for its victory over Japan. But for the corresponding men’s
competition in 2014, the winning German team won $35 million—while the Americans, who
lost in the round of 16, took home $8 million. Spurred by the media reports, Senator Patrick
Leahy of Vermont introduced a resolution on the floor of the U.S. Senate urging FIFA,
the organization that sponsors the World Cup, to “immediately eliminate gender pay inequity”:
Here is where I think the Senator and the media critics go wrong. The prize disparity
has much more to do with sports economics than sexism.
The women’s players are formidable athletes and the Women’s World
Cup is growing rapidly in popularity, especially in the U.S., but it’s still nowhere near
the men’s cup in terms of world popularity. According to FIFA, the 2011 Women’s World
Cup had an audience reach of less than 250 million viewers. For the men’s World Cup
in, 2010 the figure was 2.2 billion. That same year, the men’s World Cup generated nearly $3.7
billion in revenue, while the women’s World Cup generated about $73 million. Now FIFA may be a
troubled organization, and sexism can probably be counted among its many vices—but the
differences in its men’s and women’s prizes are actually less than the differences in
its revenues from the two competitions. Market forces, rather than sexism, appear to explain the pay gap in soccer.
Well, the sports equity activists have heard all of this before, and they have a reply. “Why accept market forces?” they ask. After all,
these forces were shaped by a culture that has been hostile to women, traditionally. Shane
Ferro, a feminist business reporter at Business Insider says it this way: “Most of us
have been socialized to accept men’s sports as dominant, and somehow automatically more
interesting.” And once society internalizes a falsehood, she says, “it’s very hard
to correct it.” Hard, but apparently not impossible because now there is now a call by sports equity activists
to change the market by re-socializing fans. “Sports fans, for the most part, will watch
whatever you put in front of them,” says Kavitha Davidson at Bloomberg News. She thinks we should highlight
the women’s teams, and fan interest and excitement will come. A recently published
study by two feminist sociologists comes to the same conclusion. The authors
lament that women’s sports receive only about 3% of network TV attention, down from
5% in 1989. Major sports media, they say, is a “place set up by men for men to celebrate
men’s sensational athletic accomplishments” while giving short shrift to women’s achievements.
They acknowledge that there are fewer female teams, so they suggest for now the media increase
coverage of women’s sports to 12–18%. They also specify that the sportscasters should
report on women’s sports with the same “enthusiasm” as men’s sports. More coverage plus more
enthusiasm will increase the fan base, and that will drive up women’s salaries and
prizes. Well, I think it might be the gender sociologists and the feminist journalists—not the sports
fans— who have internalized a falsehood. There are athletic competitions where women
attract more fans than men—figure skating and gymnastics, for example. And women’s
tennis, while not as popular as men’s, certainly has a large and devoted audience. But when
it comes to team sports like basketball, football and soccer, no amount of affirmative-action
enthusiasm is going to even the score. Men are stronger, faster, and bigger than women,
both on average and at the extremes. Most fans—not all, but most—want to see the
sport they love played at the highest level. Men’s professional team sports are a fascination
to many millions of fans because they offer extreme competition, performance, and heroics.
Women’s team sports, however skilled and admirable, rarely compare in Promethean drama.
There is a fallacy at the heart of the sports equity argument. The equity activists insist
that male and female athletes should be treated the same; while accepting that the sexes are
different and must play on separate teams. To be consistent, they should call for integrated
teams and let men and women compete together for the same audiences and same prizes. That would end
the career of most female athletes, but a few would make it and, if it’s a popular
sport like basketball or soccer, they would likely become the richest and most famous
athletes of all time. I doubt that politicians and activist journalists will actually propose
this—but it makes as much sense as insisting that women’s teams with separate standards
of performance must be given the same salary, prizes, publicity, and enthusiasm that the
men’s teams enjoy. My suggestion: let’s take the gender politics out of sports altogether
and just enjoy the games. If you found this video to be valuable, please subscribe to
the series, follow me on Twitter and Facebook And thank you for watching the Factual Feminist.