Career opportunities for women circa 1922
“U.S. Soccer and Top Players Agree to Guarantee Equal Pay” (NYT, May 18):
That reality arrived Wednesday in landmark contracts with the U.S. Soccer Federation that will guarantee, for the first time, that soccer players representing the United States men’s and women’s national teams will receive the same pay when competing in international matches and competitions.
In addition to equal rates of pay for individual matches, the deals include a provision, believed to be the first of its kind, through which the teams will pool the unequal prize money payments U.S. Soccer receives from FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, for their participation in the quadrennial World Cup. Starting with the 2022 men’s tournament and the 2023 Women’s World Cup, that money will be shared equally among the members of both teams.
It sounds as though those who identify as “women” are better players than “men”:
The difference in compensation for men and women has been one of the most contentious issues in soccer in recent years, particularly after the American women won consecutive World Cup championships, in 2015 and 2019, and the men failed to qualify for the 2018 tournament. Over the years, the women’s team, which includes some of the world’s most recognizable athletes, had escalated and amplified its fight in court filings, news media interviews and on the sport’s grandest stages.
The men are literal failures while the women are winners. But the NYT doesn’t mention that this national team of winners (not failures like the men) has been beaten by a city team of 14-year-olds who identify as “boys”. “THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT World Cup-winning US Women’s team suffer shock 5-2 defeat to FC Dallas’ U-15 boys academy side” (The Sun, 2017):
THEY are currently the best women’s football team in the world.
But not even the likes of legendary midfielder Carli Lloyd could prevent the US women’s national team from crashing to a shock defeat against the FC Dallas U-15 boys academy side on Sunday.
What happens when different gender IDs compete off the soccer pitch? From H.L. Mencken’s 1922 book, In Defense of Women (Ketanji’s panel of biologists was not required back then to define the term “women”):
One seldom, if ever, hears of [women] succeeding in the occupations which bring out such expertness most lavishly—for example, tuning pianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie., matching petty tricks with some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books, or managing factories—despite the circumstance that the great majority of such occupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why women shouldn’t succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a special demand for them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women graduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them to make a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity; once the door is entered there remains no special handicap within. But, as every one knows, the number of women actually practising these trades and professions is very small, and few of them have attained to any distinction in competition with men.
And the employer’s perspective:
The economic and social advantage that women thus seek in marriage—and the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to the heart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a husband with a Rolls-Royce—is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the underlying causes of their precarious economic condition before marriage rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress upon an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its highest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the disadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of this disadvantage, as we have seen, is congenital; their very intellectual enterprise makes it difficult for them to become the efficient machines that men are. But part of it is also due to the fact that, with marriage always before them, coloring their every vision of the future, and holding out a steady promise of swift and complete relief, they are under no such implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid arts they revolt against. The time is too short and the incentive too feeble. Before the woman employee of twenty-one can master a tenth of the idiotic “knowledge” in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or even convince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the head of the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons the business. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put away the hope of marriage, or, at all events, admitted the possibility that she, may have to do so soon or late, that she buckles down in earnest to whatever craft she practises, and makes a genuine effort to develop competence. No sane man, seeking a woman for a post requiring laborious training and unremitting diligence, would select a woman still definitely young and marriageable. To the contrary, he would choose either a woman so unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable of snaring a man, or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as to be pathologically emptied of the normal aspirations of her sex.
Full text at Project Gutenberg.
Related:
- From 2013, “Women with elite education opting out of full-time careers” (Vanderbilt)
- “This Woman’s Viral Argument For Marriage As A Career Has The Internet All Riled Up” (HuffPost): As for tips on how to find an employer-husband, the Kansas housewife suggests women actually work for the “high value” men they want to pursue: “You want a lawyer, right? So then you should be a paralegal. Or if you want a dentist, then you should be a dental hygienist.” … [the author] took issue with women who criticize other women who marry their bosses: “Women will bully the woman who’s the secretary who married the doctor, but who has the last laugh?” she asked on camera. “Her in her McMansion with her husband and her baby.” … “The message I try to get across to women is there’s a third economic option outside of serving in the military or receiving an education: You can marry an established man,” Drummond told us via email. “Once you are married, his wealth is your wealth, if he succeeds, you succeed.”
- Speaking of serving in the military (above), folks of all gender IDs can join the US Air Force:
