What Next - How Soccer's Best Women Finally Got Paid
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you want to understand the way inequality is baked into the systems and structures all around us, examining the pay equity issue in U.S. soccer is a pretty good place to start. But after a six-year battle, the U.S. Women’s National Team struck an agreement with U.S. Soccer, ensuring equal pay for equal work for the men’s and women’s teams — another victory for a team that doesn’t take no for an answer.
Guest: Christina Cauterucci, senior writer at Slate and a former middle school soccer star.
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Transcript
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| 0:34.5 | When the shooting and evolved, I happened. We were working on this show. It's about women's |
| 0:40.0 | soccer and pay equity. And while the news is really dark right now, maybe even because the news |
| 0:45.5 | is really dark right now, we wanted to share this with you anyway. Even though it was a couple |
| 0:50.8 | days later. Alright, here we go. When I think about US women's soccer, I think about a certain |
| 1:01.2 | swagger. I think about Brandy Chastain, scoring a winning goal at the World Cup and ripping |
| 1:06.8 | her shirt off in celebration. I think about Purple Herod Megan Rapinoe and her teammates singing |
| 1:13.3 | We are the champions and drinking champagne after they dominated internationally in 2019. |
| 1:26.5 | Slate's Christina Carterucci. She loves this confidence. But when she thinks about US women's |
| 1:32.0 | soccer, she thinks about something else. Call it accessibility. I remember my parents taking |
| 1:38.8 | me my sister to see a US women's national team game in the 90s and feeling like these were real |
| 1:51.0 | people celebrities. What do you mean when you say that? Well, they were approachable. |
| 1:59.6 | And it felt like they had, you know, superhuman talent on the soccer field. But they |
| 2:06.6 | looked like regular people. They wore ponytails. We wore the same umbrose. Now thinking back on it, |
| 2:15.5 | I wonder if part of that also had to do with the fact that even though these were the top soccer |
| 2:21.6 | players in the country and in the world, they weren't getting paid that much and they were playing |
| 2:28.5 | at like this tiny stadium that, you know, my older sister's soccer team could have conceivably |
... |
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