Uneven Pay on the Field: Examining the Gender Wage Gap in the FIFA Women's World Cup

Female football players get 25 cents for every dollar earned by males.

Still, that's an improvement from the previous year, when it was less than eight cents per dollar, according to data from FIFA and the worldwide players' union FIFPRO.

For the first time, FIFA announced in June that about $49 million of the record $110 million Women's World Cup prize money will go directly to individual players — at least $30,000 for playing and $270,000 for each woman on the winning squad.

The remainder of the purse will be divided among participant federations, who will decide how much money to provide to teams and players, if any at all.

There have been a few visible incidents of pay gap changes in other sports. Professional tennis is the first. Since 2007, all Grand Slam tournaments have awarded equal prize money to men and women. Furthermore, beginning in 2027, the following two tiers of tennis tournaments will award prize money equivalent to the men's tour.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the first pieces of legislation to directly target the gender gap, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in pay, hiring, firing, and promotion. Pay transparency regulations and salary history prohibitions are two other recent policies that have helped to close the gender gap.