women's soccer goes to FIFA video games

Electronic Arts is adding female soccer players to its popular FIFA 16 game. What took so long? The game maker’s CEO explains. By most measures, the United States’ Women’s World Cup win last Sunday was a raving success: The final game garnered more U.S. viewers than any other soccer match in history. But so far, the public’s growing interest in women’s soccer hasn’t translated into better pay for its female players. The winning women’s team received $2 million, far less than the $35 million which FIFA, soccer’s troubled governing organization, awarded the first-place German men’s team after the 2014 World Cup (worse, it’s also less than the $8 million given to some of the losing men’s teams that same year). While equal pay remains elusive, women’s soccer will soon be able to celebrate a different sort of victory—one that is small yet symbolic. For the first time, female players will be included in a new version of Electronic Arts’ popular soccer video game, FIFA 16. The game, recently announced by the company, will launch in September and is expected to feature women’s teams from the United States, Germany, France, Brazil, Mexico and a small handful of other countries. With soccer poised to become the most popular women’s sport in the U.S., and women now accounting for half of the overall gaming population, it’s about damn time EA added women’s teams to the roster. In a recent interview with Fortune, Andrew Wilson, the game maker’s youngish and newish CEO, agreed but said it has taken the company time to do it “properly” and get the animation and physics right for female players. “Football [what the rest of the world calls soccer] is now played by as many females as males and more and more girls are now playing our FIFA games,” said Wilson. “To not represent them in the game that they play in the real world and the game that they play in the virtual world doesn’t make any sense.” According to Wilson, EA didn’t attempt to bring women’s teams to its FIFA games in the past because the split between male and female gamers was “never as profound as it is today.” “It really grew rapidly over a short period of time,” said Wilson. “Once we reached critical mass and the feedback [to add women] started coming, it took us time to build it. We wanted to make sure that these women that were playing football in our game were playing as they did in the real world, that it was a realistic representation of the quality and caliber of the football that they play.” Now, some fans are even petitioning EA to put the Women’s World Cup champions on the upcoming game’s cover, a slot that has been held by soccer superstar Lionel Messi in recent years. (Messi is still expected to grace FIFA 16’s cover, though EA has given fans the ability to vote for both male and female players to be featured on regional editions of the game and is expected to reveal those results soon.) There is no doubt that female gamers have been marginalized for a long time—or worse, as in the case of last year’s vicious spate of cyber-bullying attacks, also known as Gamergate. But while game publishers have largely stayed silent in the past, the sheer numbers of female gamers now make it critical for them to not only make sure women don’t feel threatened by the gaming community, but also to find new ways to represent them in the actual games. To that end, adding women to FIFA 16 seems like a no-brainer for EA. No, it doesn’t solve the large issue—the massive pay gap between male and female players—but it does make a lot of sense for EA’s bottom line.

China's stock market compared to the Greece crisis

Chinese stocks rose strongly for a second day on Friday, buoyed by a barrage of government support measures, but worries persist about the long-term impact that four weeks of stock market turmoil may have on the world's second-largest economy. Over the past two weeks Chinese authorities have cut interest rates, suspended initial public offerings, relaxed margin lending and collateral rules and enlisted brokerages to buy stocks, backed by cash from the central bank. Some analysts predict further moves to come from the central bank, which often makes policy announcements over the weekend, such as another rate cut or relaxation of the amount of cash banks must hold as reserves. The frantic efforts to stem the market slide finally began to gain traction on Thursday, when shares rose around 6 percent after the securities regulator banned shareholders with large stakes in listed firms from selling. The CSI300 index of the largest listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen rose another 5.4 percent on Friday, while the Shanghai Composite Index closed up 4.5 percent. "Chinese investors move in herds," said Samuel Chien, a partner of Shanghai-based hedge fund manager BoomTrend Investment Management Co. "After panic selling drove the market down to the extreme, prices are now starting to move in the other direction." RIPPLE EFFECT At the depths of their slump earlier this week Chinese shares had fallen more than 30 percent from their mid-June peak, and for some global investors China's market turmoil had become a greater concern than the crisis in Greece. Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a research note that the biggest damage from the market turmoil was likely to be the denting of investors' faith in the ability of Chinese policymakers to manage asset prices smoothly. The BofA Merrill analysts also expected the ripple effect to eventually hit the real economy and corporate earnings. "We expect this will likely hurt consumption down the road," the note said. "More critical is a potential distortion to credit flows due to the impairment to financial institutions' balance sheets." Other economists disagreed that the tumult in the stock market was likely to spill over and affect consumption. Although China's equity market is dominated by retail investors, Julian Evans-Pritchard at Capital Economics in Singapore said only a relatively small, wealthy portion of the population owned shares. "Indeed, given that the stock market didn't provide any noticeable boost to spending on the way up, there is no reason to expect it to be a drag on the way down," he wrote. MALFUNCTIONING MARKET While Beijing's efforts appear to have put a floor under the stock market for now, it is still far from back to normal. Around 1,300 of China's listed companies - nearly half the market - remained suspended after a scramble by firms earlier in the week to escape the carnage by having trading in their stock halted. About 60 companies resumed trading on Friday. Many of those that remained trading, meanwhile, were propped up by state-directed buying. On Friday Shanghai Securities News reported that insurers had brought 112.3 billion yuan ($18.1 billion) of equity since the rout began. The plunge in China's previously booming stock markets, which had more than doubled in the year to mid-June, has created a major headache for President Xi Jinping and China's top leaders, who are already grappling with slowing growth. Many investors say China's unprecedented attempts to arrest the slide have undermined its commitment to give markets a "decisive" role in pricing assets. "They can probably stabilize the market, but it will be a political decision, as they will have to compel government, state agencies, banks, pension funds, insurance companies to buy," said Ashok Shah, investment director at London & Capital. "Essentially the political decision is: to transfer the potential losses from private investors ... to the state in some manner." (Additional reporting by Pete Sweeney and Kazunori Takada; in Shanghai and Pratima Desai in London; Writing by Alex Richardson; Editing by Will Waterman)

What does the Confederate flag represent?

Editor's note: This article was first published in April before the Supreme Court ruled June 18 that the state of Texas was within its rights when it denied the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ application for a proposed specialty license plate featuring the rebel flag. In light of June 17’s church shooting in South Carolina, allegedly by 21-year-old Dylann Roof, a white man, which left nine African Americans dead, people are once again calling for the Confederate flag to be removed from flying outside the South Carolina Statehouse. The Supreme Court is currently deliberating one of the more noxious and symbolic racial cases of our time. All nine justices are chewing on a fundamental question: Did the state of Texas in 2010 violate the free speech rights of the Sons of Confederate Veterans when it rejected a proposed specialty license plate featuring the controversial rebel flag? If things shake out in its favor, the SCV, a slick post-Civil War so-called heritage group, stands to have all the rebel-flag plates it wants. Overwhelmed by angry public comments, Texas had rejected SCV’s proposal after several states approved it. With Texas’ combined 40 percent population of color, the state’s racial complexion is rapidly changing. Outraged by the proposal, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) blasted then-Gov. Rick Perry’s Republican administration in 2011 for even considering it. “Ill intended or not, why would African Americans want to be reminded of a legalized system of involuntary servitude, dehumanization, rape and mass murder?” she asked. Because almost half of all Americans don’t feel the same way she does. In a YouGov poll released this week, there’s actually a split over what the Confederate flag means and what we should do with it. Some 40 percent of Americans approve of a rebel-flag vanity plate—in fact, more people are fine with it than are not. And while you would think that there’s higher approval for the Confederate flag in the South, there isn’t: Approval of the license plate is at 49 percent in the West, compared with 41 percent in the South. The various breakdowns (pdf) on this are a bit surreal, if not surprising, given today’s racial climate. More whites view the flag as a symbol of “Southern pride” (47 percent) than of racism, with 40 percent of whites also approving of its display. African Americans, understandably, do not feel the same: Fifty-five percent of blacks see it as racism, and only 13 percent approve of its display. The largest group of all those polled, 41 percent, consider the flag a symbol of Southern pride, compared with 31 percent who view it as a symbol of racism. When the results are broken down by party, 63 percent of Republicans view it as Southern pride, compared with only 28 percent of Democrats who do. A majority of independents see it as good-ole’-boy Deep South pride, too. These findings align with the results of a 2011 Pew Research poll, which showed that 58 percent of Americans have neither a positive nor a negative reaction to the Confederate flag. Only 29 percent of whites had a negative reaction, compared with 41 percent of African Americans. That number is still low, given that so many black people’s ancestors were subjected to unspeakable horrors under that flag and what it symbolized. Worse yet: Thirty-six percent of whites and 33 percent of blacks in that Pew poll felt it was “appropriate to praise Confederate leaders.” The Pew poll was four years ago. But based on the response to this week’s YouGov poll, folks are in desperate need of a national refresher course on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and a segregationist past that ended not so long ago. So let’s just stop framing the Confederate-flag issue as a free speech issue and call it what it is: treason.