The U.S. women’s soccer team has a reputation for never giving up. If they happen to concede a goal or two, you can expect them to maximize every chance until they’ve closed the gap or taken the lead.

On International Women’s Day, they showed that fighting mentality off the field when the team’s 28 players sued the U.S. Soccer Federation for “years of ongoing institutionalized gender discrimination,” according to a press release. 

The suit is the latest phase in a battle for equality that launched in 2016 when the team’s highest-profile players filed a wage discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The players, including Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, and Carli Lloyd, argued that despite working as hard as — and even outperforming — the U.S. soccer men’s team, they received less compensation. 

The new suit alleges that not enough has changed. The women, who will defend their World Cup title this summer, are seeking an end to discriminatory practices as well as asking for back pay, damages, and attorney’s fees, among other forms of relief. 

“In light of our team’s unparalleled success on the field, it’s a shame that we still are fighting for treatment that reflects our achievements and contributions to the sport.”

“In light of our team’s unparalleled success on the field, it’s a shame that we still are fighting for treatment that reflects our achievements and contributions to the sport,” Lloyd said in a statement.  “We have made progress in narrowing the gender pay gap, however progress does not mean that we will stop working to realize our legal rights and make equality a reality for our sport.” 

SEE ALSO: Barack Obama tweets inspiring thread to celebrate International Women’s Day

U.S. Soccer Federation has yet to respond to Mashable’s request for comment, though it told NBC News that it doesn’t comment on pending litigation. 

The suit draws on the 2016 complaint by again pointing out that the women’s team has previously brought in substantially more revenue than the men’s team and yet earned significantly less for their work and achievements, which include multiple world championship titles. (The men have never won a World Cup or Olympic gold medal.) 

At the time of the EEOC wage complaint, the female players could earn a maximum salary of $72,000 plus bonuses for winning certain matches or making it to the World Cup or Olympics. One comparison of the wage disparity, included in the new suit, suggests that if both the men’s and women’s team had played and won the same number of friendly matches in a single year, the female players would earn a maximum of $99,000 per year whereas the men would get an average of $262,320. 

Part of this massive gap had to do with the separate bargaining agreements struck by each team. The men, who could rely on large salaries thanks to gigs with Major League Soccer, settled on a lucrative bonus structure. The women, on the other hand, couldn’t count on their professional league, the National Women’s Soccer League, for a competitive annual income and sought that instead from U.S. Soccer, in addition to securing paid maternity leave. 

Yet even after the women’s team got closer to equal pay with a new collective bargaining agreement in 2017, the federation allegedly rejected the players’ requests for compensation equal to what the men received, according to the suit. Following the 2016 complaint, a representative for the federation reportedly said, “market realities are such that the women do not deserve to be paid equally to the men.” 

That’s a predictable, common argument against equal pay, but the new suit undermines it considerably. As the suit reminds the public, the women have clearly demonstrated they can bring in more revenue than the men; in the 2016 fiscal year, their World Cup victory was largely responsible for taking a projected combined net loss of $430,000 for both teams and turning it into a profit of more than $17 million.  

The suit also outlines the many ways in which the women still inexplicably get less, all around, than the men. This includes how women frequently play on a dangerous artificial surfaces when the men do not, fly commercial when the men travel by more convenient, comfortable charter flights, and the alleged allocation of fewer resources to promote women’s games compared to men’s. 

That last point is critical: If U.S. Soccer Federation doesn’t equitably invest in promoting the women’s team, the players have no shot at drawing the crowds and interest that will consistently generate revenue comparable to what the men’s team earns. 

“We feel a responsibility not only to stand up for what we know we deserve as athletes, but also for what we know is right”

Additionally, paying them less because soccer fans sometimes prefer to watch men play isn’t a reflection of the true value of the women’s team. Instead, it’s just more evidence of how female athletes — and non-athletes, too — can put in the same amount of work as men and still suffer professionally and personally thanks to entrenched cultural attitudes about whether they are as exciting or competitive or talented as men. 

It’s no wonder that when the players requested and received the right to sue from the EEOC, they seized the opportunity. Some of their critics will say they don’t deserve what they seek, or that they should just be grateful for the incremental gains they’ve already won. But surrender would be out of character for a group of players long known for their ability to persist despite setbacks that, for other teams, would spell defeat.

Rapinoe said it best in her statement about the suit: “We feel a responsibility not only to stand up for what we know we deserve as athletes, but also for what we know is right – on behalf of our teammates, future teammates, fellow women athletes, and women all around the world.”

I totally meant to bleed for Game of Thrones. I just forgot to sign up.

Fortunately, a very patient man in vaguely medieval garb reassured me that donating blood wasn’t actually a prerequisite for entering Bleed for the Throne – the activation-slash-blood-drive presented by HBO and the American Red Cross at South by Southwest. 

He let me into the enormous event space, and I found myself in Westeros – or as close as I was ever going to get to Westeros, anyway. 

SEE ALSO: Battle lines are drawn in intense ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8 trailer

Bleed for the Throne consists of three parts, not counting the blood drive. The literal centerpiece is a hall made up to look like some combination of a church and a throne room, with the Iron Throne in the middle (with a glowing Red Cross logo behind it) and pews running down each side. 

Turn right, and you’ll find yourself outdoors, in a rough approximation of a Westerosi war camp; turn left, and you’ll make your way through an audiovisual journey recapping familiar storylines from the show.

I started with the latter, and was promptly confronted by a knight demanding to know if I was willing to bleed for the throne. He would turn out to be the first of many. I announced that I was not only ready to bleed, but to die, and he ushered me into a series of rooms meant to represent four separate characters who’ve “bled for the throne”: Jon, Arya, Cersei, and Tyrion.

I put on the headphones I’d been given, through which Jon Snow recapped these characters’ storylines so far. Some of those rooms were niftier than others; Cersei’s involved large projections of faces yelling “SHAME” at you, and Tyrion’s a photo opp with a statue of The Mountain. None of them offered any new clues or insights about where these characters might go next, or at least not that I saw – this entire portion of the event was built around stuff that had already happened.

Things got significantly more interesting as I returned my headphones (“Please return your audio devices at the desk,” Jon instructed politely) and passed into the camp. Tents dotted the outdoor space, while actors dressed like northmen or Unsullied or Braavosi swordswomen milled about. 

If you’ve ever wondered what it’d be like to live in Westeros, this immersive experience seemed to provide an answer. There was never any shortage of things to gawk at, from the two men practicing sword-fighting in one corner to the fortune teller inviting people into her tent.

Unfortunately for me, a person who hates talking to strangers, there was also never any shortage of people to talk to. All those actors I mentioned above kept coming up to me and trying to make conversation, usually by asking whether I knew how to fight, what house I came from, which side I was on, and, of course, whether I’d bleed for the throne.

That these actors so fully committed to their roles, never breaking or backing down even in the face of my nervous laughter, is a testament to their professionalism. But small talk is small talk, and at least in my experience, it doesn’t get any less awkward when the person on the other end of the conversation isn’t really a person at all, but a simulacrum of a person. 

Perhaps someone more open or outgoing would have found it fun, rather than mildly terrifying. Certainly I saw other SXSW attendees improvising backstories to tell the knights, or quizzing northmen on Jon Snow’s chances of defeating the dead. Me, though, I started turning the other way whenever I saw an actor headed toward me, and hoping they didn’t find me too terribly rude for doing so. 

Which, in truth, is probably exactly the experience of being a commoner in Westeros. If you’ve watched even a few episodes of Game of Thrones, it’s clear that the roads of Westeros are littered with the bodies of smallfolk who just wanted to go about their own business, but had the misfortune of attracting the attentions of more powerful people demanding to know their allegiances or pressing them to fight. 

I may like to think of myself as a power player like Cersei or a hero like Brienne, but when it comes down to it, I probably have way more in common with an anonymous fruit-seller slaughtered for being in the wrong territory. 

That realization (and the fact that the camp is only so big) drove me back into the building to attend service, which was headed up by a red priestess making impassioned declarations about the coming war and whatnot, as a choir sang the Game of Thrones theme song. 

The Iron Throne stood behind her, empty but awash in light. One could nitpick the logic of the scene, I guess – the Iron Throne is not inside a red temple – but it was hard to argue with the dramatic impact.

Attendees who’d donated blood were invited to step forward and kneel before the throne, and rewarded with Hand of the King pins. I remained in the pews, where another red priestess periodically swept through to whisper to one attendee or another.

When she got to me, she warned me that the path before me was dark, but that she could see a light at the end, and she implored me to go toward that light. 

I took her at her word, and after a few minutes made my way out of Bleed for the Throne and back into the streets of Austin. I was thrilled to have visited Westeros, and lived to tell the tale. But as a commoner at heart, I was even gladder that I could go back to watching Westeros from the safe distance of my TV, rather than trying to survive it on the ground.

Medium has reinvented itself many times over, but one facet of its identity seems to be sticking: it’s becoming the writing platform of choice for billionaires, billionaire politicians, and anti-billionaire politicians alike.

On Friday, senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren published a blog post on Medium with her plan to break up Big Tech, including Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Gotta love the use of a tech platform to call out the tech industry.

SEE ALSO: Jeff Bezos chose Medium for possibly the most important blog post of his life

But this wasn’t the first time eyeballs flocked to Medium for a major — if slightly more salacious — announcement. In February, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos chose Medium to make his bombshell announcement that the National Enquirer was trying to blackmail him with dick pics, and that he was not afraid!

As CEO of Amazon, Bezos and Warren will likely be at odds for years to come. But at least they’re united in their love of Medium.

Another Warren adversary used Medium for a big announcement of his own. Presidential hopeful and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz published a post on Medium defending his decision to run for president, essentially issuing a “screw the haters” message.

Evan Williams, a former Twitter CEO and creator of a popular mid-aughts blogging platform, Blogger, founded Medium in 2012 as an alternative way for people to share and discover ideas online. Based in San Francisco, but with operations in both San Francisco and New York, it attracted 60 million monthly readers in 2017, when it launched its subscription service. It unveiled four subscription publications in 2019.

Medium has a hybrid model as both a place where anyone can post things for free (a platform) and a news outlet (a publisher). This inspired Recode to call it a “Platisher” in 2014, declaring, “A new generation of media companies is experimenting with opening their content-management systems to outsiders.”

That hybrid model has led to some missteps. Medium’s publisher efforts have launched, shut down, and re-launched several times, with layoffs and shutdowns in both 2015 and 2017, and the most recent re-launch currently underway.

Medium allows users to publish for free and pays editorial staffers and freelance writers. BuzzFeed has a somewhat similar model, which came under fire after layoffs and the discovery that one of its most popular content creators was an unpaid teenager responsible for 700 viral quizzes. 

This year, along with its new editorial publications, Medium become the hot place for high-profile personalities like Schultz, Bezos, and Warren to reach out to the public. Keep your eyes peeled, chances are we’ll see more big announcements on Medium soon.