Today is International Women’s Day; an important occasion which gives people across the world to celebrate global achievements and take the opportunity to push for change.
When I look back at what has occurred across the sporting landscape over the last decade, I reflect on how much there is to celebrate.
Growing up in the 1990s, rugby league and cricket were my favourite sports. I watched these sports along with my dad and brothers. I associated both sports with boys and men. I never even turned my mind to the idea that women and girls should or could have the chance to play these sports too.
Part of that is because you can’t be what you can’t see and in the early 1990s there was a severe lack of female sporting role models.
That is no longer the case with the next generation of boys and girls growing up in a world where it is the norm that men and women can compete in their favourite sports at an elite level.
In particular, the last five years in particular has shown us what is possible.
On March 8 2020, 86,174 people gathered at the MCG for the ICC T20 Women’s World Cup Final. This was the highest attendance for a women’s sporting fixture ever held in Australia and the highest attendance for a women’s cricket match anywhere in the world.
Just a lazy 86,000 at the MCG for the Women’s World Cup final. (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
The success of the Australian women that night reflected the result of significant investment by Cricket Australia and the state bodies to professionalise women’s cricket. The dominance of the Australian Women’s Cricket team has not happened overnight; it is the result of intentional behaviour by the governing body.
There is now so much women’s sport on television that I can’t keep up; with professional competitions including the AFLW, NRLW, WBBL, WNBL and Super Netball with the WBBL being ranked as Australia’s fourth most watched sporting competition.
Not only do we get to watch these competitions, but we get to listen to other women talk about them too in the commentary box. Women like Mel Jones, Alex Blackwell, Kelli Underwood, Daisy Pearce, Tarsha Gale and Sam Bremner are all part of the coverage and their insights and laughter are a welcome change from the male-dominated commentary boxes I had become accustomed to.
The establishment of these competitions has also meant that grassroots has been a focus. For rugby league in New South Wales, girls can progress from the Tarsha Gale Cup into the Harvey Norman Women’s Premiership and then aspire to play in the NRLW.
Women are everywhere you look in sport – on our screens, in our boardrooms, refereeing, in the stands and more importantly women like Ash Barty, Madi de Rozario, Ellyse Perry and Sam Kerr are household names.
We have come a long way, but the next five years is critical, particularly with some of the international sport scheduled to be played in Australia like the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup and the FIFA Women’s 2023 World Cup.
Now, questions about whether anyone is actually watching women’s sport have become a rarity.
But the real challenge is the shifting these women towards becoming full-time professional athletes.
There are too many people that are currently comfortable with women competing at an elite level being forced to operate against a background of financial insecurity.
Stories about women competing and then leaving a game to get some sleep before the next shift at McDonalds or Bunnings are common.
Given the expectation of performance on the field, it’s too much to expect elite performance when these women are not being given the chance to play their sport full time or be even close to being compensated appropriately.
Our sports have the money to be able to make this investment. They are making a choice not to at this stage. And it is not going to be ok to continue to make this decision for the next five years.
Our governing bodies need a roadmap of how they will work towards professionalisation and ensuring that our female athletes have the resources around them to succeed, just like their male counterparts.
Additionally, whilst we have seen more and more women involved as players, commentators and administrators the next real growth opportunity is women in coaching.
Despite the abundance of sporting competitions, there are very few women coaching. There are no female coaches in the NRLW, none of the 14 teams in the AFLW do either and only three female coaches have been at the helm since the competition started in 2017.
There are structural reasons behind this. Many staff involved in our women’s competitions are part-time or do it on top of their existing day jobs which are centred around the men’s program.
Just like pathways have been developed for our female players, the same needs to be done for female coaches. But additionally, women need to be given opportunity instead of some men using the women’s program as a pathway to leap into men’s coaching.
Incredible progress has been made in five years. But I look forward to five years time when women’s sport coverage is more prevalent in the news, when professional sporting competitions have made the commitment to invest in women’s sport.
In so much men’s sport we waited 70 years to make the athletes professional. Let’s not make the same mistakes again.
Naughty's Headband
Roar Rookie
I feel like there's a few harsh truths that this puff piece is deliberately avoiding. It's a revision of history. The idea that women didn't have the opporunity to play professional sport is farcical. What has changed is that there's been a generation of girls who have been encouraged to be masculine, so now women want to play men's sports. When I grew up in the 90's girls were happy being girls and didn't yearn to be like the men; they wanted to be the best women they could be. This shift in mindset is what has driven the want for women to play men's sports professionally. Women's cricket and footy competitions have been around for 30+ years; they just couldn't attract players. And we didn't wait 70 years to make men's sports professional - television was invented, then colour television, creating a whole new product to sell to TV stations. The unfortunate truth is that by and large people aren't interested in buying the product of women's team sports. And all the stuff about "needing" to create pathways is bollocks - no-one "needs" to be in the professional sporting industry, it's a privilege to be skilled enough that people want to watch you do it. Women's sport will become professional if it can gain an audience that wants to watch it. That may take 70 years, it may never happen. I appreciate that the feminists believe that the women should be paid as professionals regardless of the income it generates but that's backed by feminist myopia, not economic reality. No-one deserves to be paid based on if they're a boy or a girl. The reality is that the "progress" by women's sports has been by piggy-backing off men teams brands; would people really turn up to watch the AFLW if they weren't wearing AFL club jumpers? Unlikely. Where would women's sports be if the AFL, NRL and CA didn't fund them using revenue generated by men's sports? Who pays for the "pathways"? Men's sports. Behind all the girl-power stuff is a cheque written by men. Women's team sports will actually be successful if and when they stand on their own two feet. Using the WNBA as an example, a league that has been going for 25 years in a huge market and still makes a loss every year, there isn't much chance of that happening. Maybe the WNBA would've been successful if they piggy-backed of the blokes clubs as well.
MPC
Guest
Hi Mary, Happy IWD. It is not sports related, but why did the SJW's get triggered by Adele saying she is proud to be a woman? She said nothing controversial and it was great to see a strong independent woman being proud about what she has accomplished.