All Things Being Equal: The Genesis, Costs and Aftermath of the USWNT's Equal Pay Battle

by Rich Nichols, Hope Solo (Foreword), Sam Yip (Primary Contributor)

The story of Women's Soccer’s fight for equal pay as chronicled by counsel and leader of the USWNT’s Players Association.

In All Things Being Equal , Rich Nichols—former counsel for Women’s Soccer—teams up with USA Today ’s Sam Yip to detail what transpired during the players' fight for equal pay. Nichols argues that, when deep in the proverbial red zone, the team ultimately lacked the strength and resolve to solidify true equal pay.

The book serves as a wake-up call to show future generations of young girls—and then some—the level of personal and professional commitment required to achieve true equality for women in the workplace. The reader will feel armed with the tools needed to find a seat at the equal pay negotiating table—a chance to observe and feel exactly what went down, step by step, and to feel the intensity of the struggle against the power of US Soccer’s resolve to deny equal pay. The authors describe what it took for the women on the USWNT to even get as far as they did—close enough to the edge of success to actually see the spoils of their labor.

216 pages, Hardcover

Published May 14, 2024

Reviews

[John Schorg · Rating 2 out of 5]

The quest for equal pay between men and women is a serious subject for study, and the ongoing fight by the US Women's National Team against the Neanderthal treatment by US Soccer offers a perfect way to look at the issue. This account does not help. The author is primarily concerned with talking about how great he is and how things would have been better if everyone on the team had listened to him. His descriptions of the negotiations can be hard to follow, and some points in the dispute are rehashed to a distracting degree. Through it all, I continually wondered how the late, great Grant Wahl would have handled this subject.

[Lauren DeMers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well...the information about the USWNT's equal pay battle was interesting and I learned a lot about their pay structure, what the fight was for and what they ultimately received. But, this book desperately needed an editor and it made for a frustrating read. The same thing would be repeated paragraph after paragraph. Towards the end of the book there was a section about the Spanish Women's National Team and I read it 3-4 times because something that was stated in that section wasn't brought up before and I thought I misread or completed missed a couple sentences. It was finally explained on the next page in the next chapter. There were so many sentences that started with "Accordingly, " that I actually noticed and started to get annoyed when I saw one.

Interesting topic, but ultimately poorly written.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don’t think I could have gotten this book from the library at a better time what with the Olympics going on, and sadly the usual nasty things posted about women in sports. This book takes the reader behind the scenes of the battle for equal pay (and more) by the USWNT. The author a black lawyer well understood why equality matters and takes us through the history of US soccer and how the money made by the successful women’s side was used not for their benefit but to prop up the men’s side. Very interesting.

[Laura Denton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting bits of information but almost unreadable due to the amount of repetition in the writing