The biggest star in women's soccer was underpaid her entire career. Now she's fighting back

The minute Abby Wambach decided to retire, she got angry.

The World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist has had arguably one of the most historic careers in sports. She was a six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year and the highest all-time goal scorer for the U.S. women’s national team. With 184 goals, the New York-native holds the record for international points — for both female and male soccer players.

So you might think Wambach has little to be angry about after her 13-year-long career. What she is angry about is how much she was paid for all her accomplishments.

“I was angry, not just at the situation, but at myself,” she said when we sat down for an interview last week at the Watermark Conference. “I was allowing myself to get paid less than I think that I deserved. I was afraid to rock the boat. I was afraid to push the limits. So many people out there feel the same stress, feel the same things that I was feeling.”

Despite being one of the most celebrated female athletes in the world, Wambach fell victim to a gap in pay that transcends soccer and affects professional athletes in every sport. When Wambach and her teammates won the FIFA World Cup last summer, they were paid $2 million for their victory. The German men’s team who won the same title the year before earned $34 million. According to Forbes’ highest paid athletes list, the top 10 female athletes make just 13.1% of what men make.

Wambach’s burst of anger about this pay discrepancy came at the worst possible moment for her personally. After all, she is no longer getting paid by U.S. Soccer. But she isn’t going to allow the players that follow in her footsteps to make the same mistake. At the age of 35, Wambach is dedicating the next stage of her career to fighting for equal pay. Convinced she has the platform and the fame to make a dent on the issue, Wambach told me “enough is enough.”

Wambach ambitiously isn’t limiting  her campaign to equal pay on the field. She hopes she can help tackle the omnipresent pay gap in the professional world as well. Since retiring in October, Wambach has sought the advice of high-powered business leaders like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Equinox President Sarah Robb O'Hagan. Through conversations with these women, she has realized that the good old boys’ club in business is not very different from the one in sports. With that in mind, the solution to closing the pay gap in the respective fields can’t be that different either, she said.

While it was clear from speaking with Wambach that she is passionate about the cause, what remains to be seen is if she can turn her passion into results. After getting caught  driving under the influence in Portland, Wambach’s role as spokesperson for gender equality is being called further into question.

When I asked her about the arrest, I expected her to do what most business leaders do when they are targeted with negative questioning: Deny, dodge, and deny again. Yet Wambach did just the opposite. Everyone makes mistakes, she told me, and it’s critical that role models in sports, business, and beyond not only own up to those mistakes, but make them known.

In February, Wambach went from figurative role model for young women to a literal one -- Mattel made her into a Barbie doll.  She isn't sure if the toy maker will keep the doll in circulation after her run in with the law. But if you follow Wambach's logic, her openness about the charge is all the more reason to keep the doll in stores. 

“If the leaders aren't capable of standing up and being like, ‘Hey, I messed up,’ then that's not real,” she said. “The President of the United States, the President of Russia, they make mistakes too, right? Sometimes it's just not talked about, but why not?”

It’s Wambach’s candid and straightforward attitude that make me think she might actually have what it takes to shake up the seemingly stagnant conversation around wage equality. I’ve been following the gender pay gap since I started my career as a reporter. It’s easy to get bogged down in the magnitude of the problem. Wambach, on the other hand, is focusing on the magnitude of the opportunity in a way that I feel like only an Olympic athlete can.

Some edited highlights:

On the role men play in achieving gender equality

It's so important you get the men on board. It's like gay rights. Being a gay woman, I know if I were to stand up and speak up for gay rights, [people would say] ‘Oh yeah, of course, you're gay.’ If a straight person were to stand up and fight for gay rights, that's more powerful. That holds more weight. Same thing goes with gender stuff.

On what it takes to be an Olympic athlete

It's a weird thing to say out loud, but you go and practice and if you haven't killed yourself during that practice at some point, then you didn't do well enough. To muster that mentality every single day to know you're going to kill yourself the next day, and the next day, and the next day — that's something that's hard to get used to, and it's survival of the fittest in a lot of ways. Over the course of the year of training up until the World Cup, people who are strong enough to withstand that kind of pressure and that kind of mentality and that kind of environment, they usually last, and the people that don't, just don't. I think that's why our team has been so successful over the many years that it has been in creation.

On learning from Sheryl Sandberg

She's so smart. Very, very rarely am I sitting in a meeting and it gets completely taken over by another woman, so it was really fun for a meeting to get completely taken over. Let's just take the gender out of it. Successful people are successful because they believe in themselves, they have a mission, and they stick to it. They have a stick-to-it intuitiveness that's bar none. I think it's really important that people believe that whatever they're going for and they're going after, they do wholeheartedly.

On failure

I think the failures in my life have been the most important moments that have ever happened. For everybody, failures are the moments where you can stop and wake up. Like, OK, something I was doing wasn't working. I now have to refocus my energy and re-figure out this problem and sort out what I need to do better the next time around so that I don't end up with the same result. That's why failures are so beautiful —  they're great because they give you the opportunity to start over, to rededicate yourself, and to realign yourself so that you can actually head in the right direction.