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For years, the U.S. women’s national team has been fighting the U.S. Soccer Federation alleging unequal pay. The dispute was as much a legal saga as it was cultural touchpoint, capturing the zeitgeist and dominating headlines. It was perhaps no clearer than after the USWNT won the Women’s World Cup in France in 2019 and the crowd’s chants in Lyon morphed from “U-S-A!” to “equal pay!”
But it’s over now. On Tuesday, the players and U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone presented a united front to announce that a settlement had been reached and the lawsuit was going to end. It’s a moment for the history books: the conclusion of one of the most contentious battles between U.S. Soccer and the USWNT.
How did this lawsuit start, and why does it feel like it’s taken years?
The lawsuit that has been settled was filed on March 8, 2019, which happened to fall on International Women’s Day and was only about four months before the Women’s World Cup in France. In it, the players alleged gender discrimination from U.S. Soccer for both compensation — including much smaller performance bonuses than the men’s team earned — and working conditions.
While the players’ representatives may have ultimately picked International Women’s Day intentionally, they did not initially want to file the lawsuit right before playing in their biggest tournament. It was necessitated by steps taken three years earlier when five USWNT players filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was the first legal step to settling a discrimination complaint. That 2016 claim got stuck in government bureaucracy amid the changeover from the Obama to Trump administrations.
After sitting with the EEOC for more than two years, the players were eventually granted the right to sue U.S. Soccer outright without going through the EEOC, which had a 90-day deadline. Therefore, they had to file their lawsuit shortly before the 2019 World Cup.
That touched off the long legal process,…
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Source : espn
