U.S. Women’s Soccer has been fighting a very public battle for pay parity for years.
World Cup Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist Hope Solo joined Cheddar for a special #chedHER day of programming to discuss how the wide gap has affected her life.
“Even being among the best soccer players in the world, I wasn’t making a good enough living,” she told Cheddar in an interview. “I had to supplement my income by doing appearances, by doing photo shoots, oftentimes having my former agent try to convince me to do things like Playboy.”
Solo and her teammates filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Soccer Federation back in 2016 to protest the disparities between men’s and women’s salaries in the sport.
The men, who failed to qualify for this year’s World Cup after a stunning loss to Trinidad and Tobago in 2017, have not had much luck at the biggest events.
But they reportedly get paid four times as much as their female counterparts, who incidentally have brought home three World Cups and four Olympic Golds.
Part of the reason, Solo says, is broad pay inequity that plagues so many industries. But it also has to do with how the athletes are portrayed in the media.
“We sexualize female athletes,” she told Cheddar. “Before every Olympic Game, many different media come out with a list of the sexiest female athletes. If you scroll down on any article, maybe about me, you’ll see at the very bottom, women on Sports Illustrated covers.”
The women’s team reached an agreement with the sport’s governing body last year, but it stopped short of mandating equal pay for both teams.
For full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/hope-solo-on-closing-the-gender-pay-gap-in-sports).
Kayla McDonald, 19, a budding collegiate gymnast, is paving her own path and doing it with some history tacked along.
Cheddar News checks in on what to look out for on The Day Ahead. March Madness continues with the remaining Sweet 16 teams in the tournament while 'John Wick 4' makes its debut in theaters nationwide.
Willis Reed, who dramatically emerged from the locker room minutes before Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals to spark the New York Knicks to their first championship and create one of sports’ most enduring examples of playing through pain, has died. He was 80.
Shohei Ohtani emerged from the bullpen and fanned Los Angeles Angels teammate Mike Trout for the final out in a matchup the whole baseball world wanted to see, leading Japan over the defending champion United States 3-2 for its first World Baseball Classic title since 2009.
No. 1 seed Indiana Hoosiers have been eliminated from the March Madness women's tournament.
Fanatics is now the official jersey supplier of the National Hockey League, replacing Adidas, and the deal will kick off in the 2024-2025 season.
The NCAA men's tournament is down to the Sweet 16, which kicks off on Thursday.
Trea Turner, Paul Goldschmidt and an unrelenting U.S. lineup kept putting crooked numbers on the scoreboard, a dynamic display of the huge gap between an American team of major leaguers and Cubans struggling on the world stage as top players have left the island nation.
The top four seeds in the tournament were given to South Carolina, Indiana, Virginia Tech and Stanford — and the Cardinal was the first to bow out.
March Madness is heading to the Sweet 16 without a handful of top teams. Two No. 1 seeds, Kansas and Purdue, No. 2 seed Arizona and No. 4 seed Virginia are all gone — and gone with them are millions of busted brackets.
