In the Media
Jeffrey Kessler: USWNT and Their Fight for Equal Pay
In the Media
Jeffrey Kessler: USWNT and Their Fight for Equal Pay
October 1, 2019
On March 8, the U.S. Women’s Soccer team filed the gender-discrimination lawsuit, represented by Winston & Strawn. The players contend that U.S. Soccer violates the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by unlawfully paying them lower wages than the U.S. men’s national team. Lead counsel and Winston & Strawn Co-Executive Chairman, Jeffrey Kessler, believes that the attention and support the case has, and continues to receive, will have significant ramifications on how women are treated, not just in sports, but in the workplace.
“This particular struggle by these women has captured the attention and support of really the entire world in a way that no previous case about gender discrimination has been able to do up until now. And because of that, the outcome of this case has the potential to be very influential in the entire dialogue about how women are treated in the workplace. And how society takes steps to make sure that unconscious bias is eliminated,” he said.
“I am not naive enough to believe that there still isn’t a lot of bias in the world—both conscious and unconscious—and we all have to work to strive against that. But we’d like to think that the support we are seeing for the women’s team today demonstrates that people do recognize this. This is one of the few issues that people seem to be able to put aside their other differences and unite around.”
Read the full Forbes article here, to learn more about Jeffrey’s insights into the women’s soccer team case and the gender pay gap.