“If Morgan or Rapinoe earned more than a top American male national team player in a year, the judge pointed out, it was only because they had to play so many more games — and win more of them. Not to mention attending many more training camps and performing many more duties. If you pay a woman $10 an hour but she has to work a double shift to take home as much as a man making $20 an hour, that ain’t equal. What matters is the rate they’re paid at, not whether she manages, with sheer strenuousness, to make up the difference. From January 2017 through October 2019, Morgan and Rapinoe et. al. won 83 percent of their games, while the men’s team won just 48 percent. The women racked up a record of 48-4-6. The men went 21-11-13 over the same stretch. The women played 58 matches, with 46 friendlies, five World Cup qualifiers and seven World Cup games. The men played just 44 matches with no World Cup games. So yes, Morgan made $1,201,449.64 over that period, more than her male peer. But had she been paid at the same rate as him for the same work, she’d have made $4,104,920.65. For Rapinoe, the difference between being an American woman player and an American man was the difference between $1.16 million and $3.7 million. For Lloyd, $1.2 million versus $4.1 million. For Becky Sauerbrunn, $1.18 million versus $4.17 million. The notion that a woman has to work two jobs to have a chance to make what a male earns at a single job is not only legally wrong under Title VII and the Equal Pay Act, it is morally repugnant. What is likely to rile a jury just as much are the crummy little details of their treatment. In 2017, U.S. Soccer pampered its men’s team with charter flights on 17 occasions. It did not charter-fly the women’s team even once. Players consider charter flights a major reprieve and factor in physical recovery, as they allow for more rest before and after games, with no long waits or missed connections in airports. This injury, the judge noted, ‘is concrete.’ For years, the USWNT has made less money for more and better work and has been treated worse for it. A judge has recognized that. Next, a jury can make the federation accountable for it — with back pay and punitive rewards for every little slight and baked-in sexist assumption inflicted on every individual in the entire class of plaintiffs, which includes any woman who has been called up to a training camp since 2015. If the federation was smart, which it isn’t, it would recognize the size of the bill about to come due.”
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