The Economics behind the Football Gender Pay Gap may not be as simple as you think
You’ve probably heard the argument before: women’s football doesn’t bring the same levels of revenue/investment and therefore female players shouldn’t be able to command the same wages as male ones.
In-and-of-itself, this makes sense. Workers should be compensated by the value of their product; if female football is worth less, then the players’ wages should be lower. The issue is that this assumes that the men and women’s games compete for support perfectly and, in doing so, ignores the potential impact of history.
In economics, there’s a thing called a complementarity. All this means is that as more people use a certain good/service, it becomes more valuable to you. Social media is a prime example: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter only have value in-so-far as you know other people that use them.
Complementarities almost always result in imperfect competition. Following the social media example: when Google launched Google+ in 2011, it was clearly designed to be a direct competititor to Facebook. By 2019, it had folded, citing a low user count as one the key reasons for its failure. There was very little to differentiate G+ from Facebook, and that was to its detriment — users had no reason to sacrifice the value of their existing friends on Facebook by switching to Google’s platform. By simply being the incumbent, Facebook outcompeted Google.
The appeal of watching sport works in a similar way, in that a lot of the value comes from the associated social connections (spending time with family at matches, being able to talk to a coworker that you’d otherwise have nothing in common with, etc.). It, therefore, makes sense that people tend to follow the same sports as those around them; the more others watch a sport, the more valuable watching it becomes to you.
If true, this would go some way to explaining why the men’s game has so much more support than the women’s; in going professional over a century earlier, the former monopolised the football supporter base. In the same way that Facebook trampled demand for G+, the men’s game’s incumbency puts a significant constraint on demand for the women’s.
This means that the women’s game is less profitable and so attracts lower levels of investment which, in turn, puts a cap on wages. This is also limits the supply of female footballers as it’s a less feasible career option, meaning that the standard is likely lower than it could be. It’s no surprise that the most successful national team, the US, was the first country to have a professional women’s league — especially, given the men’s division is less competitive and was only started in 1993, just 6 years earlier.
If we want women to have an equal chance to make a career out of football, we may want to stop forcing them to directly compete with the more-established men’s game. With complaints about fixture build-up common among the top men’s teams, it might make sense to reduce the amount of games they play and, instead, reserve a few weeks a season for coverage of the women’s game.
I know I, for one, could live without as many international friendlies.
