8 Times Women in Sports Fought for Equality
All 28 players on the United States women’s soccer team filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation, an escalation in their increasingly public battle for equality.
Players on the United States women’s national soccer team have been fighting for equality. They recently wore jerseys with the names of women who inspire them before playing in a SheBelieves Cup women’s soccer match. Mark Zaleski/Associated Press
The players have said that they play more games than the men’s team — and win more of them — yet still receive less pay. They said “institutionalized gender discrimination” affected not only their paychecks, but also where they played and how often, how they trained, the medical care and coaching they received, and even how they traveled to matches.
They are not alone in their fight for fairer pay and better treatment. Here are eight times in recent memory when women fought for equality in sports.
Finishing the Boston Marathon despite an attempt to eject her
Jock Semple, center right, tried to hustle Kathrine Switzer, No. 261, off the Boston Marathon course in 1967.Credit...Paul Connell/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images
Experts claimed for years that distance running was damaging to women’s health and femininity.
In 1967, women weren’t allowed to officially enter the Boston Marathon, so Kathrine Switzer entered that year as “K.V. Switzer” to hide her gender.
Two miles in, an official tried to eject her from the course, a moment captured in dramatic photographs. She finished anyway, becoming the first woman to complete the race as an official entrant.
“We learned that women are not deficient in endurance and stamina, and that running requires no fancy facilities or equipment,” Switzer wrote in The New York Times in 2007.
Women were officially allowed to enter the race in 1972. Women’s marathoning joined the Olympics in 1984.
A feminist tennis champion wins the Battle of the Sexes
Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in New York in July 1973.Credit...Anthony Camerano/Associated Press
The year 1973 was a big one for Billie Jean King, the trailblazing tennis star.
She founded the Women’s Tennis Association. She led a movement for female players to earn equal prize money in tournaments that featured players of both sexes.
And, on a September night at the Astrodome in Houston, she epitomized her crusade for gender equality when she handily beat Bobby Riggs, a self-described male chauvinist pig, in the Battle of the Sexes.
King went on to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 for her work championing the rights of women and gay people. She is considered to be one of the most important athletes of the 20th century.
“Everyone thinks women should be thrilled when we get crumbs,” King once said. “I want women to have the cake, the icing and the cherry on top, too.”
Yale rowers strip to protest lack of women’s showers
Chris Ernst is a two-time Olympic rower. But in the spring of 1976, she was the captain of Yale University’s women’s crew team — and sick of not having proper showers to use after practice.
She led 18 teammates in an eye-catching protest at Yale’s athletic office. The athletes stripped to their waists, revealing the words “Title IX,” which had been drawn in blue marker on each woman’s back and breasts.
The Times ran an article in the next day’s paper, and a photograph of the history-making event also ran in The Yale Daily News.
Within two weeks, the female rowers had new locker rooms. And, across the country, educators began viewing Title IX — which had been in effect for just four years — as a law that required compliance.
Venus Williams wins a victory for women off the court
Venus Williams played an important role in helping to close the pay gap on the tennis court.Credit...Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In 2007, after pressure from the tennis great Venus Williams and others, Wimbledon announced that women’s tennis players would receive prize money equal to the men’s.
Williams had made a failed plea to Wimbledon’s governing body the night before she won the title in 2005. And in 2006, she wrote an op-ed essay in The Times of London titled “Wimbledon Has Sent Me a Message: I’m Only a Second Class Champion.”
“Have you ever been let down by someone that you had long admired, respected and looked up to?” she wrote. “Little in life is more disappointing, particularly when that person does something that goes against the very heart of what you believe is right and fair.”
After the policies changed in 2007, she was awarded $1.4 million for her fourth Wimbledon victory, the same amount as the men’s champion, Roger Federer.
A first for women’s hockey
Emily Pfalzer, right, celebrating her goal with other members of the United States women’s national hockey team: Annie Pankowski center, and Jocelyne Lamoureux Davidson, in 2017. The team won a wage increase that year after threatening a boycott.Credit...Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times
In March 2017, the women’s national hockey team announced that it would boycott the coming world championship if U.S.A. Hockey, the sport’s national governing body, did not increase the women’s wages.
“It’s hard to believe that in 2017, we have to fight so hard just to get equitable support,” Meghan Duggan, the team’s captain, said at the time. “We want to do the fair thing, and the right thing — not just for hockey but for all women.”
They put their careers on the line, but the risk paid off.
Less than two weeks later, the team reached a four-year deal with U.S.A. Hockey. It provided the female players a $2,000 training stipend each month from the United States Olympic Committee and larger bonuses for winning medals. The team also received the same travel and insurance provisions that the men’s national team did, and a pool of prize money to be split each year.
Female surfers receive equal prize money
Paige Alms, left, and Keala Kennelly. They fought for equal pay in surfing.Credit...Dina Litovsky/REDUX for The New York Times
Four prominent female big-wave surfers, Bianca Valenti, Andrea Moller, Keala Kennelly and Paige Alms, spent years fighting for equal pay in the largely male sport where they regularly risk their lives.
Last July, the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing, an organization formed by six women, sent letters to the California Coastal Commission arguing that by treating women unequally, the World Surf League was in violation of state civil rights law.
Months later, in September, Valenti and other female surfers earned a victory when the World Surf League announced it would offer equal prize money to men and women.
Valenti, along with Sabrina Brennan, the president of the San Mateo County Harbor Commission, and Karen Tynan, a labor lawyer, also successfully pushed for women to be included in the Maverick’s Challenge, a big-wave surfing competition that had traditionally invited only men.
“Some people would tell me that by trying to get the (prize) pie redistributed I was ruining it for everyone,” Moller said in December. “But I would just say: ‘That’s wrong. We’re fighting for the industry. People love watching women surf big waves, so the whole sport will grow.’”
W.N.B.A. players speak up
Skylar Diggins-Smith has raised awareness about pay inequity in basketball.Credit...Tim Clayton/Corbis, via Getty Images
In the world of professional basketball, pay disparities are well-documented: In the N.B.A., a multibillion-dollar industry where players often make millions, the minimum starting salary is about eight times what the average W.N.B.A. player makes.
And female players are speaking up, on social media and on TV.
Skylar Diggins-Smith, the W.N.B.A. All-Star who plays guard for the Dallas Wings, recently appeared in a commercial to raise awareness about pay inequity.
The commercial, by the investment adviser Wealthsimple, contrasts the paths of two young players, a boy and a girl. Each lists their basketball dreams and accomplishments, but only one will grow up to receive a multimillion-dollar rookie contract.
A’ja Wilson, a star rookie who was the first overall W.N.B.A. draft pick in 2018, has also weighed in: “must. be. nice,” she wrote about LeBron James’s $154 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers. “We over here looking for a M but Lord, let me get back in my lane.”
Wilson earned about $53,000 that season. The top N.B.A. draft pick last year, Deandre Ayton, was expected to earn about $6.8 million in his first year playing for the Phoenix Suns.
The best female soccer player boycotts the World Cup
Ada Hegerberg, the women’s Ballon d’Or winner, quit the Norwegian national team in 2017 in protest of what she said was a lack of support for women’s soccer in her home country.Credit...Pete Kiehart for The New York Times
Ada Hegerberg, a 23-year-old Norwegian, was recognized as the best female soccer player in the world last year when she became the first person to win the women’s Ballon d'Or, a prestigious individual honor in soccer that had previously been reserved for men.
Despite the big award, she has decided not to play on the biggest stage of all, the Women’s World Cup, in France this summer.
Hegerberg quit the Norwegian national team in 2017 in protest of what she said was a lack of support for women’s soccer in her home country.
“I was quite clear with them about what I thought needed to be better,” she said in an interview after winning the Ballon d’Or. “I gave them the reasons. I wish my national team all the best. I love my country. I wish I could play for them. In this case, I had to move on.”