On top of winning the World Cup, the U.S. womens soccer team did something else truly amazing this month: They got the whole country talking about economics specifically, equal pay for women.
At a parade in their honor in New York on Wednesday, crowds chanted for equal pay. And the wage gap the difference between what men and women earn became the subject of conversation on sports radio and in places typically unbothered by the gender inequality.
The question now is: Whats next?
Right now in the U.S., women are paid on average 80 cents for every dollar a man earns, and the pay gap is even worse for women of color. The womens team wage gap is even more shocking theyre making just 38 cents on the dollar compared to the mens team, according to the discrimination suit the women filed in March .
For Megan Rapinoe and her teammates, the path to equal pay is a huge battle, but its parameters are clear. They know theyre not being paid as much as their male counterparts. And their fight is taking place in court , with the added lever of public pressure. (It was only seconds after they won their final match in France that the crowd started chanting equal pay.)
To help fix the problem, the team will likely renegotiate its contract.
For women in the U.S. more broadly, the path to closing the pay gap is winding and exponentially more complicated. There is also a contract that needs updating, but its essentially the entire social contract: From public policy, to business practices to the way couples negotiate family life, the whole fabric needs a rethink.
Do everything, said Kate Bahn, an economist and the director of labor market policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank. Theres no silver bullet.
Women are paid less for a few reasons theres sexism and pay discrimination like the soccer team faces, to be sure, but there are also structural biases. They do a disproportionate amount of child care and other kinds of caregiving work raising children, caring for elderly parents. That cuts into their ability to get the kinds of jobs that pay more.
Bahn, like many other economists and advocates for equal pay, points to essentially three ways to get to equal pay: Public policies that help women stay at work and fight discrimination, workplace change and cultural shifts.
Policy
First, theres paid leave. Its simple. Women who get paid time off after they have children can keep their jobs and move up their career ladder, according to many studies and anecdotal evidence from companies.
The trick here is to keep things equal. Men should receive the same time off as women and they should be encouraged to take advantage of it. Otherwise men will still be able to work more and women will lose out to their male counterparts in hiring and promotion.
Then when the baby comes, the bills pile on. Access to affordable child care is critical to keeping women, mothers, in the workforce. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has made child care a cornerstone policy proposal in her campaign to grab the Democratic nomination for president.
We certainly hear from a lot of pregnant women and mothers who are scared about being pushed out [of jobs] and needing to work, said Sarah Brafman, a staff attorney at the advocacy group A Better Balance. Lets say a woman gets pregnant. If she needs an accommodation and she gets pushed off the job, then she loses out on income. So then shes pregnant and taking the financial hit. If she gives birth and [has] no leave, again shes out of the workforce and not able to work.
These are big problems considering that women make up around 40% of the primary or sole breadwinners in families with children, she points out. You look at enormous child care costs. Families have to make a difficult choice and all of those contribute to the gender pay gap, Brafman said.
Another problem the majority of the lowest paid workers in the country are women, making up more than half of minimum wage workers. Simply raising the wage floor would help close the pay gap.
All these policies are even more crucial for single mothers.
On their face, these family-friendly policies arent about the pay gap, but there are other laws that do tackle equal pay head-on.
There are efforts underway to make it illegal to pay men more for work that is comparable to work done by women for example, hotel housekeepers (mostly women) shouldnt be paid less than hotel janitors (mostly men). New York state on Wednesday passed a provision like this .
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