Back in 2016, a group of five women’s soccer players filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over the fact that they were not being paid the same as the members of the men’s teams. (A complaint I found nonsensical at the time, but that’s the world we live in now.) A few years later, in 2019, a larger group of female players brought a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, making the same claims. That case knocked around in the courts for several years until this week when it seems to have been put to rest. The USSF agreed to settle with the women and will fork over more than $24 million to them after also agreeing that the women’s and men’s teams would be paid the same in the future. Now we should probably just start ticking off the days on the calendar until one of them (ahem) goes bankrupt. (NBC News)

U.S. women soccer stars, including Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, have reached a $24 million settlement with the U.S. Soccer Federation following a lawsuit over unequal pay with men’s team players.

The landmark settlement was announced Tuesday, years after a group of five U.S. Women’s National Team players filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint over inequality in pay and treatment.

According to the terms of the settlement, U.S. Soccer will pay men and women at an equal rate in the future in all friendlies and tournaments, including the World Cup.

U.S. Soccer appeared to have a social justice gun to its head while announcing how “pleased” they were with the settlement and the new terms and conditions. They spoke glowingly of their “shared commitment to advancing equality in soccer.”

Of course, there’s still one major problem with this agreement that nobody covering the story in the media seems to want to bring up. No matter how much you may profess to love soccer played by either men or women, the fact is that women’s soccer has never delivered anywhere near the ratings that the men’s leagues report. Revenue from women’s soccer is very much lower than is seen from men’s soccer. So where is this money going to be coming from?

Let’s just put this in real-world terms for a moment. Let’s say you happen to be a female computer programmer (just to pick a random example) and you take a job at a medium-sized software company. If you discover that your salary is less than half of what your male colleagues with the same education and breadth of experience are making, you could very well have something to complain about.

But if you take a job at a smaller, start-up company for that salary and then read that the senior male programmers at Microsoft living in Silicon Vally are getting ten times as much as you and that leads you to sue your employer, you might be delusional. Sure, the Microsoft programmers might be making a million dollars per year, but Microsoft can afford that because their revenue last year was in the range of $20 billion. Your new employer might not even be able to show a million dollars in revenue. If they are forced to pay that much to you the company will immediately fold and none of you will have jobs.

This settlement agreement isn’t “pay equality.” It’s extortion. The average NFL player currently earns around $840,000 per season. The average Canadian Football League player brings home around $80K. Why? Because the CFL’s market reach is minuscule compared to the NFL’s and they don’t bring in that kind of money. This is madness, and yet here we are. Welcome to the woke world.