News Corp's latest narrow-minded attack on women's sport misses the point

On Sunday, an article by Paul Kent in the Daily Telegraph got me so fired up I tweeted about and then seethed for several hours.

Usually inflammatory articles are written with the intention of getting clicks and then, when it comes to the mastheads associated with Fox Sports, to generate enough discussion and controversy that they can be discussed on NRL360 and have another article written about them.

The cycle continues on and on.

To help break that cycle and save you clicking on the article, Kent’s premise was basically that the NRLW is “subsidised entirely by the men’s game”, so how much do these women deserve to be paid?

According to Kent, “claiming the women train just as hard as the men” is irrelevant because “nobody is paid for the effort that they exert”.

I’ll begin with something small; use of the word ‘girls’ in the headline.

I know that, in the course of conversation, we use the word boys and girls to refer to our players. Hashtags like #YTG and #YTB are common and when I’m on the couch watching the Parramatta Eels men’s team, I’ll often look to the sky and plead “come on boys” when things aren’t going right.

But the difference between all that informal conversation and Kent’s article is just that; in informal conversations the word ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ can be thrown around. The players can also make choices as to how they refer to each other in the dressing sheds.

But when you are writing a headline – and this was unlikely to have been Kent’s job – for a masthead, my preference is that the word ‘women’ (or similar) is used.

These players are not little girls and should not be infantilised in order to get a point across.

The word ‘girls’ was used as a tactic and it set the tone for the rest of the article, which also began with a reference to housekeeping, in the non-domestic sense, which was important to note because the article was about women.

It makes me deeply uncomfortable how comfortable some men seem to be with the idea of women being plunged into financial insecurity to play sport at an elite level.

That’s not an exaggeration. There has been plenty of commentary by female athletes about the financial hit they are taking to compete. In the A-League, Fiona Worts had to leave Brisbane immediately following a game to get back to Adelaide to work her McDonalds shift first thing in the morning.

Anyone would think that Kent was being asked to pay the women out of his own pocket.

Kent argued that because the competition is running at a loss, the players’ request to be compensated appropriately is unrealistic.

It’s narrow-minded thinking like this that would prevent investment ever taking place into something new. Growth requires investment. Growth is an opportunity and rarely comes along for free.

The argument about the competition running at a loss is never made when we talk about the existence of our NRL clubs, many of which at some point were propped up by money from HQ.

Similar arguments are not made when it comes to expansion either, it seems accepted that millions of dollars need to be pumped into new clubs to reap the rewards eventually.

The same needs to be done with women’s sport; invest now and reap the rewards.

Cricket is a wonderful example of this through the professionalisation of the national team and then through the state competitions, the WBBL and the WNCL.

The WBBL is now Australia’s fourth-highest rating sports league in Australia and Cricket Australia will no doubt reap the benefits of this in its next broadcast deal. This did not happen overnight, it happened through investment into the women’s game.

(Photo by Speed Media/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

In so much commentary, the onus is put on the women competing to keep doing more. Comments like ‘if the product was better more people would watch’ get thrown around, but how can we expect the quality to improve when women do not have the opportunity to focus on their craft full-time?

If women are given that opportunity, then the standards will absolutely improve, with cricket being a prime example.

Media companies have invested in market and subsidies to help make men’s sport a market. This has been the norm for the last 50 years.

Players are not asking to be paid what the men are. How could they be, theirs is a six-week competition.

But to confuse the idea of the women requesting to be paid appropriately, with women making unreasonable demands is unfair.

The journey toward professionalism must begin this year. It’s not enough for targets to be set. I want the NRL to set a roadmap for how we can make our female athletes full-time professional. It will only benefit the sport with more people watching more games. That equals broadcast dollars.

The sad reality is if that the NRL are slow to act, then other sports will continue to progress and we can be left behind.

All while debate is happening on how to spend the $43 million profit that the NRL made last year. I wonder how much of that was a result of the women’s competition not taking place at all?