Starting this month, millions of viewers will watch women’s soccer on television, and even start to recognize players by their first names. Some might wonder why audiences only see these world-class players, like Abby Wambach, who holds the international goal-scoring record—for women and men—for a few weeks every two years at the World Cup or the Olympics. But most, even those who care about equality for women, won’t consider how different these athletes’ careers are compared to those of men who do the exact same thing for a living.

Today, the gap between men’s and women’s wages, the tiny fraction of female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, and the lack of respect for Hollywood actresses and directors receive regular and impassioned coverage in both the mainstream and feminist media. The gender inequities in sports are just as vast as those faced by women in corporate offices and on movie sets, but for some reason they fail to incite the same level of outrage.

In 1978, in the midst of the second-wave feminist movement, Hollis Elkins, a professor of women’s studies at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, published a paper that asked why the women’s movement hadn’t ever concerned itself with equality in sports. (This was six years after the passage of Title IX, which prohibited sex discrimination in federally funded schools, including in athletic departments.) Elkins died in 2013, but if she were alive today, she’d likely still be asking the same question.

Elkins laid out four main reasons why the women’s movement was wary about involving itself in sports. One: Female athletes were perceived as either unconcerned with or hostile toward the women’s movement. Two: Feminists didn’t want to be “doubly damned” by “the suspicion of lesbianism” that both feminists and female athletes faced. Three: Sports was seen as a realm where men proved their manliness, negatively predisposing many feminists toward sports in general. And four: Sports was considered “frivolous.” It wasn’t seen as being as important as issues like the right to work, abortion, and equal pay.

In October of last year, the biggest names in women’s soccer did something unprecedented: They sued the world soccer governing body. A group of top international players including Wambach, Brazil’s Marta, and Germany’s Nadine Angerer filed a gender-discrimination lawsuit against the Canadian Soccer Association and FIFA citing the fact that this year’s World Cup in Canada would be played on artificial turf instead of natural grass. All six prior women’s World Cups, and all 20 men’s, have been played on grass fields, because it’s considered a superior playing surface. Simply by pointing to gender discrimination, the lawsuit did something female athletes don’t usually do.

“There’s a major fear of the explicit use of the term feminism to sell women’s soccer,” says Rachel Allison, a professor of sociology at Mississippi State University who has studied women’s professional soccer. “The one major event that’s broken that trend is the FIFA turf lawsuit.”