The House has passed a bill that ensures equal compensation for U.S. women competing in international events, a chunk of laws that got here out of the U.S. women’s soccer team’s long battle to be paid as much as the boys.
The Equal Pay for Team USA Act, passed late Wednesday, would require all athletes representing the USA in global competition to receive equal pay and advantages of their sport, no matter gender. It covers America’s 50-plus national sports and requires the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee to handle oversight.
The bill had earlier passed the Senate with unanimous support. It now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk.
The bill stems from a federal gender discrimination lawsuit the U.S. women filed against U.S. Soccer in 2019. Earlier this yr, the ladies signed a recent collective bargaining agreement that included similar pay structures for men and ladies and equitable distribution of World Cup prize money.
Over the past decade, most Olympic sports within the U.S. have met USOPC standards regarding equal compensation. But there remained inequities between the boys’s and ladies’s soccer teams — whose roles in international events, reminiscent of the World Cup, resulted in unequal pay structures and different oversight — that led legislators to hunt to enshrine those standards into law.
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“By sending this laws to the President, each houses have sent a transparent message that that is the usual for all National Teams in all sports and it underscores the importance of working with our athletes to realize equal pay including equalizing international prize money,” U.S. Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone said in a press release announcing the bill’s passage.
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