Portland's Sports Bra is giving an assist to a former Nike exec and her goal of closing the gender pay gap in professional sports.
Stefanie Strack, a former Nike VP, founded her nonprofit Voice in Sport Foundation in 2019 to inspire female athletes and work to ensure they are paid as much as their male counterparts. The organization's initiative to raise the pay of Women's World Cup athletes is called Side of Equity.
In the World Cup, Strack said there is a $330 million gender pay gap between the teams, and Side of Equity’s first partner to tackle that gap is The Sports Bra, a Portland bar and showcase for women's sports. Customers of the bar will be able to add a $5 donation to their meal before the Women’s World Cup ends Aug. 20.
The funds will be distributed directly to the event's athletes through a grants process, Strack said.
“Since opening The Sports Bra last year, we have witnessed first-hand how something as small as a local bar can make a huge impact,” said Sports Bra owner Jenny Nguyen in a press release. “This June we partnered with Voice in Sport Foundation for the Side of Equity because we see that even giving small — when done on a global scale — can have a dramatic impact on something mammoth like closing the wage gap. When given the opportunity to be a part of that movement, how could you possibly say no?”
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Strack’s passion for sports goes back to growing up in Anchorage, Alaska, playing Olympic-level soccer, she said. In 1999, Strack said she had the opportunity to watch the USA team's championship-winning performance in California.
What Strack didn't know at the time was that the women’s team would make nothing for their win, while the USA men’s team took home $3.5 million in prize money. Around the same time she learned this, she founded Voice in Sport as a digital community to connect and inspire female athletes ages 13-23.
Strack built Side of Equity as an offshoot of Voice in Sport Foundation as a mechanism for anyone, from individuals to large corporations, to make contributions to closing the gender pay gap in sports.
Strack’s experience with Nike and women's sports has helped her bring high-profile athletes to Side of Equity as mentors and partners, including the Portland Thorns’ star Sophia Smith and one of Strack’s childhood heroes, Michelle Akers, whom she saw play in the 1999 Women’s World Cup.
“The beauty of what I've created is that big global brands can absolutely contribute to this fund, and they can make a huge impact for women athletes, though they have to embrace the taking action part and go beyond the marketing,” Strack said. “(Marketing) is really important for storytelling, and for awareness and visibility, but then you have to think about the impact, and think about the athletes that are actually in the game and what are they going to reap from that marketing.”
Though Sports Bra is her first partner, Strack said she is in conversations with major corporations about sponsorships and is seeking additional corporate sponsors as well.
The initiative feels like coming full circle, Strack said, because of her partnership with a business in the city she spent more than a decade in and because she gets to work with Akers on an issue that has existed for decades.
“Success would be that we close this gap of $330 million in 60 days, so when the whistle blows on Aug. 20, we've raised $330 million and then we distribute that to the women through the grant program,” Strack said. “And then we focus on our next one. Where's another gap that is just unacceptable? That might be the WNBA, it might be what the women athletes are getting in order to prepare to go to the Olympics in France. There's so many inequities that I want to crush, and I think that if we can prove it out with this model, then we have a mechanism … that can rally people behind that change.”
