On Oct. 22, the Play for Equal Pay club led by Alexa ’26, Cara ’26 and Sydney ’26 brought former United States women’s national Team player Tobin Heath to speak during the All-School Meeting. Heath addressed her journey to becoming a professional soccer player and a proponent of the gender equity lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), as well as her goals for the future of the female professional sports industry.
Heath played collegiate soccer for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and helped lead the team to four Atlantic Coast Conference titles and three NCAA Division I women’s soccer Championships. Heath continued to a professional soccer career, winning two National Women’s Soccer League championships, two Olympic gold medals, two World Cups and Player of the Year award from U.S. Soccer in 2016.
Prior to her career, Heath had already begun to notice unequal treatment between male and female athletes, especially regarding a lack of resources and representation for female athletes.
“The problem that I have faced is that I learned sports through men. My role models and how I wanted to play sports, was all through male athletes,” Heath said. “Sports was dominated by men.”
While playing on the United States women’s national team, Heath worked with her teammates to address the inequities they noticed between male and female professional soccer players in the United States. In 2019, the players filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against their USSF bosses on the basis of pay equity as they were only receiving 40% of what men’s national team players were paid.
“A lot of people think our pay equity lawsuit was about being paid equally to our male counterparts, but really it was about being treated equally, being respected and being paid fairly,” Heath said. “We didn’t just want equal [pay], because everybody knows we were better, we wanted to be paid fairly for what we were accomplishing.”
R. Gary Klausner, the judge in the lawsuit, denied the claims made by the players in April 2020, delaying the progress of the case.
“There are going to be so many people in your path that don’t agree with what you are going to do, and instead of thinking the door is closed, know there are more doors,” Heath said. “You can create the doors, you can create the avenues, and that’s exactly what we did.”
The team did not back down and continued their fight with tremendous amounts of public support. The team successfully appealed the decision, which led to a settlement in February 2022. The settlement detailed that $24 million would be given from the USSF in compensation for the athletes, as well as a pledge to continue to promote equality between the men’s and women’s national teams by equalizing salary, bonuses and appearance fees.
Although Heath described the outcome of the case as a major step forward, she believes that their work is far from finished. Heath believes in a future of challenging the institutional norms that dictate the differences in men’s and women’s sports. Heath specifically highlighted the challenges with viewership for women’s sports and how current viewing platforms are not tailored to the female audience because men’s sports have been prioritized for so long.
“I want to get the very brightest minds, all of yours included, thinking, dreaming and going after what is possible in women’s sports,” Heath said. “I think if we get the best and the next generation to believe in the future of women’s sports, that’s how we change the game.”
