U.S. women's soccer's coach made less than 10 percent of the men's coach's salary — and he was fired the year before
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The gender pay gap has never been more obvious.
The U.S. women's soccer team has raised plenty of issues with their working conditions over the past few years, including paychecks that are drastically lower than their men's team counterparts. Those problems led the team to file a gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation in March — and as Time reports in an profile of women's team co-captain Alex Morgan, it was for good reason.
Morgan's Team USA career is dotted with an Olympic gold and a World Cup victory, and she's adopted a no-politics public stance all the while — though she told Time she wouldn't accept a White House invitation from President Trump if her team won this year's World Cup. One fight Morgan is willing to plunge head-first into, though, is equality between the two U.S. soccer teams. After flying in smoking sections in the 1990s and playing so-called World Cup 2015 victory tour on rocky turf fields, Morgan and the entire team filed a suit claiming "institutionalized gender discrimination" by U.S. Soccer.
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The suit comes after a 2017 collective bargaining agreement that gave women's players royalties and marketing rights. But looking at post-agreement salaries makes it clear it didn't close the gap. Women's head coach Jill Ellis, who has a World Cup under her belt, made $318,533 in the fiscal year ending in March 2018, Time reports. Jürgen Klinsmann can't count any World Cup or Olympic victories, but he made $3.35 million that same year despite being fired as the men's team coach in 2016. Read more frustrating details at Time.
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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.
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