How long will it take?
by digby
So New York decided to give the Women’s Soccer Team a ticker tape parade today. That’s great. They deserve it.
But this depressed the hell out of me:
Friday’s ticker-tape parade in honor of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, which won the World Cup on Sunday, is the first such parade in New York to honor exclusively women since 1960. That’s when Carol Heiss received the ticker-tape treatment in honor of her figure-skating gold medal at the 1960 Winter Games. The most recent parade in which a woman was included took place in 1998, when Chiaki Mukai was honored along with the rest of the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery.
Since 1899, the year of the earliest recorded New York ticker-tape parade to honor a living person, 159 parades have honored exclusively men, 12 have honored exclusively women, and 23 honored a mix
Women were most frequently given parades because they were royalty. Thirteen queens and princesses received ticker-tape parades: 11 accompanied by their spouses, two solo. The next most common kinds of female honorees were athletes and adventurers (seven parades for each category). Women have been honored as part of Olympic teams or for a particular sports victory. The adventurers crossed the Atlantic (in planes) and the English Channel (under their own power).
The gap in parades reflects the exclusion of women from many domains, not simply a sexist parade-allocation method. A large share of the historical parades were offered for generals and heads of state at a time when women were not considered for these positions. Parades have become rarer in recent years, just as more women have achieved the positions that might have earned them parades in the past.
I’ve said this before and people roll their eyes at it. But whenever I see things like this I’m just struck by how incredibly weird it is that half the population has traditionally been at such a secondary level of status and achievement. It’s so much the norm that people don’t even think about it — including most women! And we certainly seem to be extremely patient about changing it. Even liberals seem to be rather laissez faire when it comes to women’s rights. (Certainly on a political level, they’re always the first to be traded away for something really “important.”)
It’s nice that the women’s soccer team got the recognition it deserves. But come on — 55 years since any ticker tape parade for women’s singular achievement? Like I said … depressing.
Also too:
Friday’s festivities won’t make upset fans forget that the women’s team took home $2 million for their momentous victory, less than a quarter of the $9 million that the U.S. men’s and other teams were awarded last year after losing in the first round of the men’s World Cup. (The Germans, meanwhile, took home $35 million for the championship.)
But the total prize pool for the men’s tournament was $576 million—40 times the $15 million prize pool for the women’s games.
The Women’s World Cup generated $17 million in sponsor revenue compared to the $529 million revenue pile for last year’s (men’s) World Cup tournament.
They used to say that nobody wanted to watch chicks play, but that wasn’t true this time at all: 25.4 million viewers tuned in to Fox, making it the most-watched soccer game in U.S. history. Don’t worry, all the experts say that this will likely result in a bump in women’s soccer revenue so it’s all good. They won’t make what the men make, of course, but they’ll get a little taste and that should make them happy. After all they got that rare ticker tape parade, what do they expect?
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