More people watch men's football,so that means there's more money to pay the players more, it's simple math. How people don't get this is beyond me, you can't get paid the same as the men because they are not worth the same, and that has nothing to do with sexism, the market decides what they like more.
Yes, the market decides, simple math, BUT: It's a bit of a chicken/egg situation. I don't know the specifics of every country, I can just add what I know from 'our' women team.
Soccer women in The Netherlands have been held from competing for decades. There was actual 'threats' in play when one of our national teams wanted to enter a female team in the national soccer association - even though no rules said women couldn't play. So women have been 'held from professional support' for literally decades.
Then the women after a lot of fighting (back by our men btw) this thing finally were 'allowed' to enter soccer but there was no money (of course?) to pay them. So they had to do a daytime job and at night/weekends go training. That means: these women are not training at full capacity as their male counterparts do. As long as they don't get paid well *for doing sports( they can't quit their daytime jobs to train full-time. As long as they don't train full-time they won't be 'as good'. And so 'the market' doesn't wanna pay them. And so it's on and on and on.
Chicken and egg.
I don't believe equality of outcome is a desired goal per say, but equality of opportunity is. I always come back to the same image when thinking about this.
PS: Our women became second of the world yesterday wh0000p!
PS2: My dad (The Market) said our women played better than our men last two seasons.
PS3: Our women will get paid equally to our men in 2023, pay will be gradually upgraded the next few years. Did they finally prove their worth?
PS3: The Norwegian men said 'fuck this' at some point and closed the pay gap by giving half of their 'surplus' pay to the women. Just a fun fact to close of this convo :-)
It's wrong for anyone to be oppressed in any way, shape or form, that said, you can't resolve the problem by means of quality of outcome, even thought the desire is to create equality of opportunity, the ends do not ever justify the means.
You can't pay women the same as men in soccer, for the simple reason that by doing so you are manipulating the market to compensate for a perceived inequality, which the market has dictated. And the only way of achieving this is by means of manipulating the outcome (what they get paid) in hopes that the market will then compensate.
We also need to define the market, and not anecdotally that they currently scored more goals this season. The market is made up of billions of people who watch football all over the world, who go to the games, who subscribe to sports channels, who buy the merchandise, it's the football cubs, the brands who sponsor players, the advertising expenditure, the amount of money clubs sell the broadcasting rights to media companies for, what clubs pay for players, it's the entire industry that has been built up around this for the last 50 plus years. Then there's also the facts that males just happen to be far more physiologically interested in sport than women.
This conversation mostly has to do with men vs women's soccer world cup salaries, which is based on the market. Women's world cup viewership was at a record breaking 14 million this year, compared to the 3,6 billion viewership of the men's world cup, that is 0,4% of the men's world cup market. How is it equality to pay them the same?
It's like me saying I want to be paid 99.6% more because we do the exact same work, only you work for Apple Inc, and I work for Steemit Inc.
I understand how markets work. I'm not proposing equality of outcome as I said, but equality of opportunity. For me in this case that means the women should be able to train full-time like the men and not have a second job to pay for the bills. And no, that doesn't mean equal pay, for women that would be a normal salary as if they were working a full-time job in any office. The equality of opportunity here is that they can train as much as the men can. And then the market will decide how these well-trained women will be rewarded on top of their base salary.
I completely agree with you about a living wage, if enough money is generated to afford a full time job salary. But if women's soccer generates 2.5% of what them men's WC generated you can't exactly pay them the same right? And then give the "equal pay" to that of the men is by definition equality of outcome.
Nope, you can't pay them the same - at least not now. They might be able to paid the same in a Utopian future where women generate the same revenue from commercials and merchandise as men. But until then soccer clubs can pay them a living wage. As any company does: you pay a person with the belief they will generate more revenue than you pay in wages. If at the end of the year/a few years they don't, they get fired.