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  • Essay / Gender Pay Discrimination in American Soccer

    In 2015, for the third time, the United States women's national soccer team won the World Cup, which the men's national soccer team did never accomplished. At the end of March 2016, five players from the same team filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission due to the discrimination they suffered regarding salary. (“Women earn the glory while the men earn the money in American football.”) Carli Lloyd, one of those players, said in an essay explaining why she fights for equality: “In terms of simple, we are tired of being treated like seconds. -class citizens. It tires you out after a while. And we're done with that” (“Carli Lloyd: Why I'm Fighting for Equal Pay.”) Later in her essay, Carli gives figures on the amount of money she's discriminated against . She says that if she were a male soccer player winning the World Cup, she would receive a bonus of $390,000. Instead, Carli earned $79,000 for winning the World Cup in 2015. There are other staggering numbers that show how Carli and her teammates are denied access to many different salary categories. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Carli also states in her essay that she understands that the men's team wins more globally than the women's team. However, she also states that US Soccer projects the women's soccer team will earn $5.2 million, but its men's counterparts will lose about $1 million. ("Carli Lloyd: Why I'm fighting for equal pay.") Pay discrimination against women doesn't stop at football, but extends to almost every profession for which there is sufficient income data men and women. In 2014, on average, women earned 79 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. ("Pay Equity and Discrimination.") Women and men should receive equal pay for equal work, because if they do the same thing, they should be paid the same, regardless of their gender, and because that stereotypes about women should not be the basis for how much they are paid. Throughout their lives, many women will face discrimination in one way or another, and for many of them, it will be with their wages. Kerri Sleeman, now a member of the AAUW, has a personal story of discrimination. In 1998, Sleeman got a job with a Michigan company that designed, built and installed laser welding assembly systems as a design supervisor. When she was hired, company officials told Sleeman that her salary was non-negotiable, so she accepted the salary without question. After five years of working with the company, the company was forced into bankruptcy. This allowed Sleeman to see a lifetime of claims for everyone who worked for the company. What she discovered was that the men she supervised had higher claims than she did for their two weeks' wages. After asking his supervisor why this was happening, he explained that it might be because the young men under him were the sole breadwinners. Sleeman was married, but had no children, and the supervisor explained that might explain why. The supervisor did not apologize to Kerri Sleeman at all. It's the same.