PhD Defense by Declan James Abernethy

Grass Ceiling: The United States Women’s National Soccer Team and the Fight for Equal Pay

Wednesday, April 23, 2025, 9:00 am EDT, GT Library Dissertation Defense Room, Price Gilbert 4222, Zoom Link

Abstract

In September 2022, the United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT), the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), and the United States Men’s National Soccer Team (USMNT) signed a collective bargaining agreement that provided equal terms between the two teams — including compensation, staffing, travel, and accommodations. This was the first gender-equal contract for professional soccer in America, and there was nothing comparable in any other team sport in the country. Despite copious fan support, political attention, and media coverage of this moment, there has yet to be a cohesive academic study explaining how this milestone moment occurred and why Americans cared about its realization.

Grass Ceiling uses a mixed-method research approach. The main primary sources of this project include newspapers and magazines of record, soccer-specific web coverage, memoirs, and court documents. Much of this material was accessed through online databases, but this project was also informed by materials found in four archives spread across the United States. This project also relies on eight oral histories with key figures from the team and the Federation’s past.

This dissertation finds that the equal pay deal was the byproduct of a multigenerational labor project that spanned almost four decades and included hundreds of USWNT players sharing a simple, underlying mindset to improve working conditions for themselves and those who came after them. It also contends that the USWNT’s achievement of equality succeeded because they made a broad coalition of stakeholders, including fans, politicians, and corporations, care about them, their performances, and labor issues.

Grass Ceiling demonstrates that the USWNT players actively shaped their public image to aid their labor pursuits. The players used grassroots efforts, interviews, commercial appearances, and memoirs to build a brand premised on mainstream notions of women’s empowerment and heterosexual femininity that navigated lasting fears and contradictions involving athletic womanhood. They then harnessed their celebrity as a bargaining tool to prove their value, gain economic independence from the Federation, and pressure it into contract concessions despite its long-running unwillingness to provide equal support to the team. Ultimately, the USWNT achieved equal pay in 2022 not through any individual action alone but through a combination of its long-running direct confrontations with the USSF and the help of its broader coalition.

Despite this success, driven in part by the team’s seeming representation of the fight for women’s equality, the USWNT’s contributions to the broader issue of gender discrimination were mixed. Although the USWNT cultivated relationships with politicians and their struggle helped spark an international movement for equal pay in women’s soccer, the team did not

support any specific legislative action or social protests to improve the lives of the very American women who they made themselves out to represent.

The Committee Members are:

Dr. John Smith (Chair), School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Mary McDonald, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Daniel Amsterdam, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Kirk Bowman, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Jaime Schultz, Department of Kinesiology, Pennsylvania State University