Lady Business: Soccer, equal pay, and worrying about appearances

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the seventy-second issue, published June 20, 2019.
 

(Clap-back.)

Perception vs. Reality

Throughout my journalism career, I’ve worked for employers with a variety of formal ethics policies. The exact rules change along the margins and monetary limits, but boil down into: Don’t accept bribes. Don’t accept gifts or expensive swag from the people you’re writing about; don’t allow companies you’re covering to pay for extravagant meals or travel in exchange for a story; even, at some news organizations, don’t allow your sources to buy you a cup of coffee.
 
We can quibble about the stringency of some of these policies -- I personally never remember what coffee I consume while reporting a story, let alone allow an oat-milk latte to influence my coverage -- but the general principle remains: Don’t let yourself be bought. And, equally important: Don’t let it seem like you’ve been bought. Don’t give anyone an opening to question your reporting, because the perception can be just as important as the reality.
 
Which is something that big businesses should know something about. This is, literally, PR! Worrying about public perception is what keeps six publicists employed for every working journalist. So it still surprises me when big organizations forget about why they’re paying those people -- or that all the rational explanations in the world might not matter when it seems like you’re doing something wrong.
 
Like when a big bank admits that it only pays its female employees 39 percent of what its male employees get. Sure, you can argue that you’re not trying to systemically underpay women -- it’s just that the top executives are all men, see, and those men get the best salaries, which skews the numbers. (Don’t ask why the top executives are all men, that’s a totally separate topic!) No matter the underlying explanation, you’re still going to wind up with headlines about being the “UK’s most unequal bank.”
 
Or there’s the equal-pay story of the month, and also of the past two decades:
 

Picture the expressions of U.S. Soccer Federation officials every time Alex Morgan went lightly skipping down the pitch and scored another goal in the Americans’ opening match of the World Cup.
 
…It’s going to be a lot of fun watching lawyers for the soccer federation try to justify why the U.S. women’s national team, with their air rifles for legs, are paid 38 cents on the dollar compared with their male counterparts and had to sue for fair wages. It’s going to be pure entertainment listening to federation president Carlos Cordeiro stammer out an explanation on the witness stand of why this team, which is nothing short of an American damn treasure, isn’t worth equal coin to a men’s squad that can’t beat Jamaica.

That’s from a justified barn-burner of a Washington Post column last week, in which Sally Jenkins debunks every argument the U.S. Soccer Federation and its defenders have mustered to systemically underpay their star players -- who just happen to be female. Who have sued U.S. Soccer for paying them a sliver of what their male peers get -- even though, as a New York Times Magazine feature puts it, “The women are way, way better.”
 

The men’s national team lost in the round of 16 at the 2014 World Cup and didn’t even qualify for the 2018 World Cup. American men haven’t won an Olympic medal in more than a century. Partly as a consequence of their superior results, from 2015 to 2018, the women’s team played 19 more matches than the men. In other words, the women aren’t working as hard as their male counterparts for less money; they’re working harder for less money. 

A frequent defense in equal-pay situations is that women bring in less revenue than their male counterparts: They aren’t making it through the pipeline to win those top-executive roles, and the responsibility that comes with them; they aren’t staffing the investment-banking deals or coding sprints that require frequent all-nighters and few childcare obligations; their bodies are weaker than those of male athletes, so not as many people are going to pay to watch them play soccer.
 
Except, oops:

In the three years after the U.S. women’s soccer team won the 2015 World Cup, U.S. women’s games generated more total revenue than U.S. men’s games, according to audited financial reports from the U.S. Soccer Federation. …From 2016 to 2018, women’s games generated about $50.8 million in revenue compared with $49.9 million for the men, according to U.S. soccer’s audited financial statements. In 2016, the year after the World Cup, the women generated $1.9 million more than the men. 

Turns out, sometimes the perception does match the reality!
 

Lady Bits:

--“Everything just happened naturally, without any drama. Later, an accident at the factory killed both.” I loathed The Three-Body Problem, the Chinese science-fiction novel beloved by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, so much that I once wrote a poem out of its most ridiculous lines. Including the above. But this New Yorker profile of author Liu Cixin, and how his novels reflect China’s politics and global influence, is terrific.

--Good Omens is one of my longtime favorite novels, with its delightful blend of silliness and serious theological musings. (I think a lot about how its devilish protagonist tempts humans into sin not with melodramatic Faustian bargains, but with deliberately bad urban planning and fury-inducing traffic jams. It’s very pre-The Good Place!) So I was a little disappointed with the recent Amazon series, which took itself a little too seriously, at way too much length. The cast was aces, though:
 

 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com