I love my daughters and love watching the world cup but am I the only one sick of seeing equal pay mentioned on every broadcast and in every article? I support equal pay in a business environment where my kid should be paid the same amount for the same work but as awesome as the womens national team is, even my daughter doesn't think they deserve equal pay.
She did a school project on this last month. Some interesting data point I remember:
-on Fox womens national team games average 60k viewers while men avg 240k viewers
-the last womens final brought Fox $17m while mens final brought $530m
-FIFA generated $4.5b in direct revenue for last mens wc while women brought FIFA $300m
-when Lifetime TV invested in NWSL and started airing game of the week on Sat, ratings dropped from 300k for show/movie repeats they were running to less than 20k for live games. Ratings dropped so bad they killed ratings for Lifetime shows later in the day and they stopped airing games and had to write off their investments
-in the last winter olympics, bobsledding, curling, and biathlon had higher ratings than all group stage games in last womens wc
Also she found that women already make more. They get 13% of wc revenue from us soccer compared to 9% for men.
We love watching the games but even my girl who is a strong independent badass who can go toe to toe with any boy gets pissed off when people talk about equal pay for female players. This debate weakens the equal pay arguement elsewhere... like in the business world where women do DESERVE to be paid equally (or comparably)
Can't we just enjoy the sport and leave the pay discussion out of it?
She did a school project on this last month. Some interesting data point I remember:
-on Fox womens national team games average 60k viewers while men avg 240k viewers
-the last womens final brought Fox $17m while mens final brought $530m
-FIFA generated $4.5b in direct revenue for last mens wc while women brought FIFA $300m
-when Lifetime TV invested in NWSL and started airing game of the week on Sat, ratings dropped from 300k for show/movie repeats they were running to less than 20k for live games. Ratings dropped so bad they killed ratings for Lifetime shows later in the day and they stopped airing games and had to write off their investments
-in the last winter olympics, bobsledding, curling, and biathlon had higher ratings than all group stage games in last womens wc
Also she found that women already make more. They get 13% of wc revenue from us soccer compared to 9% for men.
We love watching the games but even my girl who is a strong independent badass who can go toe to toe with any boy gets pissed off when people talk about equal pay for female players. This debate weakens the equal pay arguement elsewhere... like in the business world where women do DESERVE to be paid equally (or comparably)
Can't we just enjoy the sport and leave the pay discussion out of it?
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