My favorite game by some distance is soccer. The game has been in the news lately, most recently with the arrival of the US Women’s National Team—who have done so much to bring attention and energy to the sport of soccer—at the Tokyo Olympics. In the spirit of the moment, I wanted to start with a story about women’s soccer, one that illustrates a key feature of the dynamics that shape our world—and our health.
A key issue in the soccer world, which has belatedly risen to the fore in recent years, is the pay gap between women’s soccer and men’s soccer. One often hears, as justification for a status quo where women players make less than men, that the pay gap simply reflects the fact that women’s soccer has a consistently smaller audience than men’s soccer. While it is true that the audience for women’s soccer is smaller, this begs the questions: did this disparity simply “happen”? Or were there discrete events in the past, choices made, which, over time, led to the present outcome? The answers lie in the history of organized women’s soccer, which dates back to the 19th century.
In the 1890s, there were several women’s soccer clubs in England. In the early 1900s, some of their matches attracted thousands of spectators. This progression, building in parallel with men’s soccer, came to an abrupt halt in 1921, when the Football Association banned women’s soccer from the grounds of its clubs, out of a belief that the game was “unsuitable” for women. It was more than 45 years later, in 1969, when the Women’s Football Association was formed.
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