Why sportswomen should be paid the same as their male counterparts

The Fifa Women’s World Cup returns in July next year. As we ponder over that, it is important to explore why female athletes should be paid the same as their male counterparts.

Men are often regarded as an investment and women an expense. So, when women ask for higher wages, all you hear is that their sports ventures are not profitable enough. To put some context to it, women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn for work of equal value. This statistic applies to women in all careers and professions and is even wider for women with children. Research tells us if we keep this up, it will take about 257 years to close the global gender pay gap.

Another relevant factor is that even in this day and age, women are concentrated in lower-paid, lower-skill work with greater job insecurity, and are often grossly under-represented in decision-making roles. It is a known fact that women carry out at least two-and-a-half times more unpaid household and care work than men.

Pay disparity

Ada Hegerberg tops the list of highest-paid female footballers, with an annual income of Sh43 million, (US$431,337), while Lionel Messi, the highest-earning male footballer, earns Sh14 billion each year. Thus, Hegerberg is paid 0.3 per cent of what Messi is paid.

Closer home, the optics of the pay disparity are so bad that salaries for most female footballers are unknown. Most of them play for stipends of as little as Sh500 a week, and the unlucky ones go home empty-handed. This injustice is as a result of many issues, including a dearth of league sponsors, nonchalant sports administrators and lack of policy guidelines regarding pay disparity in local sports.

Sports has, historically, and continue to be, considered inappropriate for women, both as an activity and an interest. If a woman does muster a self-sparked interest in sport, it’s likely to be for social reasons and often at amateur level. And, needless to say, this failure (or inability) to play at highest level of any sports discipline, only favours the establishment—male sport.

Men’s sport is so heavily embedded in our social interactions and culture that women are often forced to talk for hours on end about male teams they have no interest in, just to be able to participate in office small talk. Female journalists who try to cover women’s sports end up focusing on the men’s after seeing their reports reduced to briefs in favour of the “more important” male sports stories. No journalist wants to write discarded material.

But let’s say a woman, somehow, muster an abiding passion for a female sports team. How is she going to access it? For women, access to games is much more restricted than for men—from debilitating legal barriers (some countries have prohibited women from going to the stadium for religious reasons), to social barriers (some countries only allow women to attend matches in the company of an older male), and self-imposed barriers (fear for personal safety while traveling at night or watching a match in the company of many male strangers). All these combine to make it more difficult for women to attend matches.

Advertising

Sure, they can sit at home and catch the match online or on TV. In any case, this is where most of the money comes from (think strategic advertising and product placement). Yet women, within their own households, are less likely than men to control the TV remote. They are much less likely than men to have a mobile internet connection that would allow them to stream or follow a match. And, very few matches involving female teams are available live on TV.

In other words, it isn’t that consumers value men’s sport and male athletes more, in turn making the same more valuable to companies. The issue is that the male-ness described above guarantees companies’ high returns on investment if they focus on men’s sport and male athletes. This then under-develops women’s sports, leading to the belief that women’s sports are not profitable and so women athletes should be paid less.

One thing that has become crystal clear this decade is that women, in whatever space or profession, will no longer take such significant inequality quietly. Flimsy excuses and endless gerrymandering will no longer be an excuse for unequal pay. In the coming decade, the misogyny and sexism fuelling the lack of support of female athletes will no longer prevent women from demanding better treatment. Women in sports are harnessing their brands and power and will soon have the equity they deserve.

[email protected]; @cellie_beckie