Tag: elite women

Yet it was the past and present that inevitably consumed most of the oxygen in the function room alongside the grilled chicken breast and chilled sauvignon blanc.

A brief opener about the freshly-retired Pearce’s own journey from tiny Wandiligong to premiership captain touched on continuing gains at both the elite level and via the pathways leading to what had not traditionally been regarded as “girls’ sport’’.

“Although it hurts my throat a little bit to say that out loud,’’ Pearce admitted of the slightly jarring label. “If anyone’s got a better term, shout it out.’’

The 34-year-old spoke of this positive new chapter for female athletes, and the example of AFLW’s grassroots growth from 600 participants nationally in 2015 to 600,000 in 2022.

Pearce then led a panel covering topics from visibility and pregnancy, motivation and aspiration, remuneration and menstruation — the latter an issue only now being properly researched in performance-related terms — as well as a discussion around return on investment.

“Tremendous steps forward have been made, but in many instances we have to remember we were starting from a very low base,’’ said the mother of twins, broadcaster of insightful words, and now a development coach in the Geelong men’s program.

“Existing is powerful,’’ Pearce continued, with a line that resonated for many, “but it’s not the finish line.’’

*****

Event partner Women Sport Australia, like the Australian Sports Commission’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team and the Victorian government’s much-lauded Office of Women in Sport and Recreation run by former Cricket Australia executive Sarah Styles, would, frankly, prefer not to exist.

In an organically integrated, non-discriminatory world, they would not be needed.

“Ideally we get to a position where we don’t need to operate any more, because we just have equal opportunities, and because all sport is just seen as women’s and men’s sport,’’ says WSA president Gen Dohrmann, who heads an 11-strong volunteer board working after hours to run the peak independent national advocacy body for women and girls in sport.

“I say the same thing,’’ says Dana Assenheim, a long-time ASC staffer and director of a five-member department established 18 months ago. “It should just be something that’s embedded in everything, so we don’t have to have a separate team.

“But here we are. Still.’’

Styles agrees that the goal is “for an equal sports sector to be as easy as breathing”. And, like Kate Palmer, the ASC’s first ever female CEO, from 2017-20, Styles also avoids using the term “women’s sport”.

Semantics, but not really. Let’s all just call it women in sport. Otherwise the inference is that there’s sport (what men play) and that anything else is somehow an inferior version of the original and best.

“The six years that I was head of female engagement at Cricket Australia, that was arguably the biggest thing that we were trying to unpick; this idea that you had cricket and women‘s cricket. You had the ‘normal’ game. and then you had this other thing that was somehow lesser,’’ says Styles.

“So for us that unwinding, we would call it the rewiring of old habits.’’

Or, as Palmer urged in a 2019 column in The Australian: “There is no longer a place for the subcategory known as ‘women’s sport’. There is just sport. It belongs to all. It’s what everyone plays.’’

But rarely for equal pay, with the tennis grand slams, World Surf League, Rugby Sevens and Football Australia’s Matildas and Socceroos among the notable exceptions. Despite women comprising a record 53.7 per cent of the Australian team at the Tokyo Olympics and outperforming the men in medal terms at three of the past four Games.

But rarely with achievements publicised to the same degree, with multiple studies showing just four per cent of media sports coverage globally is dedicated to women, and clear links between publicity and commercial investment

Which is no doubt a product of male dominated newsrooms. The 2021 Women’s Leadership Institute Australia’s “Take The Next Steps” report revealed 87 per cent of 60,000 sports articles in a one-month period in Australia were written by men, compared with just 47 per cent about a subject like health.

Nor are there enough women in positions of leadership and influence to usher in cultural change from the top down, with the latest Workplace Gender Equality Agency data showing that 2.7 per cent of sporting organisation Chairs (compared with 19 per cent more generally), 12.7 per cent of CEOs and 28.6 per cent of board members are women, compared with, for example, an almost 60-40 split in clerical/administration staff.

The overall gender pay gap is around 33 per cent (compared with 19.4 per cent in all other industries), Tellingly, of the 51 per cent of organisations that undertook pay gap analysis, only half then acted on the results.

Moral of the story: the statistics won’t improve until the culture and vision for change does.

*****

Palmer, who joined the ASC from netball, was a member of the MCG Trust, and is now a Richmond Football Club director, is keen to leave most of the talking to the current breed of administrator, and pass the baton after so many years of conversations and attempts to shift the dial.

“You get to the point where you have to ask ‘has anything actually changed?’ For sportswomen I think it has, but we’ve got a long way to go in terms of leadership,’’ says Palmer, who considers generational impediments including the antiquated federated structure among the biggest barriers.

“Women are not even at the decision-making table. They might be on the board at the state level or the national level, but they’re not actually Chairs, and they’re not sitting in positions where they have real power and influence.

“The biggest single issue is there are not enough women in positions where they can influence the future of the industry.’’

High performance coaching is another woefully under-represented area for females, often due to family considerations, lack of flexibility and resources.

Just 18 per cent of coaches in Tokyo in 2021 were women (23 per cent at the Paralympics), which was double the number in Rio five years earlier but still low. As of last December, fewer than 10 per cent of coaches in the Australian high performance system sport system were women.

“I think the landscape of sport hasn’t grown to include females and allow them to balance family commitments at that higher level,’’ says Dohrmann, whose day job is as CEO of Table Tennis Victoria. “Then you’ve got men who can just toss the kids off to the wife and they can be fully committed to their coaching or their executive role.’’

Another issue is the misguided notion that women need to learn how to be leaders.

“A lot of money is invested into the upskilling of females across Australia; across a lot of sports programs, the answer seems to be, ‘We need to upskill females in more training and development, so let’s put as many people as we can through the Australian Company Directors Course’,’’ says Dohrmann.

“I’ve benefited from that, so that’s been fantastic, but it’s not changing the culture. We’re not seeing these women suddenly being invited onto boards and into executive roles.’’

Dorhmann’s previous job had been as a marketing manager in gymnastics, an 80 per cent female-centric sport. When the previous (male) CEO left, the senior staff hoping for a female replacement were disappointed, and asked the Chair to explain the gender policy.

“She said the applications from women simply weren‘t there; they were wanting females to put their hand up, but they didn’t. That was a big motivator for me starting to look at CEO roles so that I could lead by example for the next generation.’’

Systemic structural and cultural barriers include processes, policies, gendered language, general biases and the framing of job descriptions that can make applying for senior positions prohibitive, along with challenges gaining the requisite high performance experience, according to the ASC’s Assenheim.

“But it’s good that it’s being spoken about a lot more. People are a lot more conscious, looking at the broader diversity, equity, inclusion space. So it’s not just women, for me, it’s people from multicultural backgrounds, LGBTIQ groups

“There’s a lot more people talking about it, there’s a lot more information – but it’s actually walking the talk is what I’m seeing that’s still not there.”

*****

Former Diamonds captain Kathryn Harby-Williams can recall when pregnant women were banned from competition, let alone had the benefit of parental leave policies and support mechanisms to assist them to return to the top level.

Indeed, her former Adelaide Thunderbirds’ teammate Trudy Gardner resorted to court action to be permitted to play when expecting her first child in 2001, was eventually granted an injunction, then later awarded $6750 in damages for “hurt and humiliation’’, plus lost payments and sponsorship.

“That’s how archaic it was,’’ says Harby-Williams, now the CEO of the Australian Netball Players’ Association, who also remembers the peanuts she was paid early in her playing career in what was then one of the few elite women’s domestic competitions, and in which the average wage this Super Netball season is $75,167, the second-highest in the land behind cricket and ahead of AFLW.

Sharni Norder (nee Layton), another ex-Diamond who finished her playing career as an AFLW All-Australian, endorsed Pearce’s “not close to the finish line” sentiments, while also keen to celebrate the wins along the way.

In 2004, the then 16-year-old was paid around $1000. By 2008, when things became semi-professional, it was $10,000. By the time her netball career finished in 2018, the minimum wage was close to $40,000.

“For me it’s not just about the money but it’s about what the money represents and the time and effort that you put in, and that’s what we’re really fighting for.’’

Palmer has noted that it is no longer acceptable to provide fewer opportunities for women, and is among the chorus hailing tennis as a standout, 50 years after Billie Jean King and the Original 9 blazed the WTA trail that has led to the sport supplying seven of the world’s top 10 highest paid female athletes in 2022, according to Forbes.

Off the court, Tennis Australia has a female Chair (Jayne Hrdlicka, since 2017) and the Australian Open a new chief umpire (Cheryl Jenkins), while other statistics include the fact that 43 per cent of TA executives and senior managers are women. All singles finals from the semis onwards are now played at night, in prime time.

*****

As a young female sportswriter who started in the very blokey 1980s, you could almost set your Swatch by the fax machine spitting out the press release from the Women’s Electoral Lobby outraged by the lack of coverage of what they would have called women’s sport.

It is still poor, relatively, but slightly higher than when the WEL was thundering about, typically, low single digits. As recently as 2010, a comprehensive ASC analysis of Australian TV news found that more airtime was devoted to horse racing than — at nine per cent — all women‘s sport combined, with years of affirmative action campaigning having done little to address the imbalance.

The disparate range of date sources agree on around 10 per cent here, compared with less than half that in the US, while a 2018 European Union study found countries such as Greece and Malta were lagging at a paltry two per cent.

While the realities of supply and demand mean that year-round AFL and NRL saturation coverage is a given, an example of the appetite for quality content is the fact that, at CODE Sports, netball is the No. 2 subscription driver behind AFL.

Yet Styles refers to the “ongoing visibility gap in elite women’s sport” that she considers the key driver of pay inequality, and the need to fix the foundations of what is driving that, for anything else is simply wallpapering over cracks.

More of that tomorrow in part two of this series, but Styles says there is a far higher bar needed to currently justify investment in women in elite sport than men, given the erroneous assumption that the interest is not there. For evidence to the contrary when the right levers are pulled, look west, across the Tasman.

“What we have seen in New Zealand is through some really purposeful tracking and collaboration, they‘ve increased coverage of women’s sport from roughly 15 per cent of total coverage to more like 25 per cent in two years,’’ says Styles.

“I think that‘s a good example of where really purposeful strategic interventions based on facts can lead to some really positive change.’’

It’s also about quality. Tone, Messaging. Perceptions. In 2019, Women Sport Australia introduced a “sport photo action award” to encourage a shift away from eye candy to a different kind of eye-catching.

“It’s been around shifting the perception of female athletes as airbrushed models who just look nice next to a piece of sport equipment, and instead seeing the images that are used alongside articles about women in sport, around their power, strength and athleticism,’’ says Dohrmann.

Three years earlier, at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Cambridge University Press research highlighted the different language and images used, based on gender. Words used in relation to male athletes included mastermind, battle, fastest, strong, dominate, real, great, win, beat, big, man. Words associated with female athletes: unmarried, married, ladies, older, participate, women, pregnant, aged, compete, strive, girls.

Meanwhile, the only sports still commanding eye-watering broadcast deals are men’s, or mixed, such as tennis, while the newer and still establishing women’s leagues, such as the football codes, have to piggyback on the men’s.

There will always be complaints that in the fledgling national leagues – where the lucky chaps got a century-plus start, on top of the obvious physiological advantages – that the standard of the female newcomers is inadequate by comparison.

“We can’t expect women in sport to be at the same level as men playing sport when they’re still semi-professional, and men have full-time contracts,’’ says Dohrmann.

“We’ve made incredible advances over the past 10 years, but why they’re still playing at a very different level to what their male counterparts are is because they have to have jobs on the side, they play shorter seasons, they don’t have access to as many support staff and things like that.

“So that argument around, ‘It’s not was good as the men’s’, well of course it’s not, because the amount of resourcing going into the men’s game compared to the women’s is catastrophically different.’’

*****

A Women Sport Australia media release described Dohrmann as “smashing the patriarchy”, while describing the 2010s as “the decade of discovery” and forecasting the 2020s to be “the decade of dominance”.

Thought we should just check in on how that’s all going. While acknowledging Covid-19 did not help, but instead merely further highlighted the inequality and which sports were prioritised. Imagine the AFL grand final simply not being played, as was the case with AFLW in 2020. Thought not.

But Dohrmann’s philosophy is of small steps and little wins, despite her frustrations over the current state of play and inequities in pay, exposure, recognition, et al. “In terms of smashing it, I don’t think that’s gonna happen overnight,’’ she concedes. “But things are definitely growing.

“I think the big thing is that the Australian public have opened their eyes to the inconsistency around women in sport and men in sport and we’re not really willing to tolerate it any more.

“I just take my hat off to all these females who are paving the way and breaking through these barriers for the next generations, because what they men have had to do is very different. They’ve walked into a hundreds-of-years-old system to be able to just have everything sort of handed to them.’’

*****

True North Research has been measuring the emotional connection to Australia‘s national and league teams since 2018. In all nine waves of research and in every iteration the top women’s team has handsomely outperformed the leading men’s within the market view (ie. all those familiar with the team).

Three women‘s teams have held the top BenchMark EC ScoreT over this period: The Australian Rugby 7s, the Matildas and more recently the Australian women’s cricket team.

In 2019, for example, females filled the top four places, and in 2023 a huge opportunity looms for perennial favourites the Matildas, as Australasia prepares to host the FIFA Women’s World Cup in July-August. Half a million tickets were sold six months before kick-off.

Football Australia’s Head of Women’s Football, Sarah Walsh, proudly recounts how all 40,000 seats to next month’s Australia-England friendly at Brentford were snapped up in 45 minutes, and is seeing signs of a welcome reshaping of the narrative around return on investment (ROI) for her sport. That is, measures not necessarily linked to viewership and attendance.

“Brands are starting to wisen up to the fact that it’s not actually all about the signage and the sponsorship and the idea that you’ve got to have a corporate hospitality package,’’ Dohrmann agrees.

“It’s, ‘Is this a brand that we are proud to be associated with and do the athletes represent our values as an organisation?’’’

Or in netball’s case last year, vice-versa. Donnell Wallam. Hancock Prospecting. Enough said.

“It’s the feel-good element of women’s sport, and I think more brands are now wanting that,’’ Dohrmann adds. “We’ve seen a lot of the sportswashing debates and things like that around the values being really important to the athletes, and I think that brands are actually taking that into account as well and thinking about the alignment of being associated with, say, an NRLW team as opposed to an NRL team. That it’s a very different message.’’

But back to the numbers. As recently as the 2017 Intergenerational Review of Australian Sport, women attracted just eight per cent of sponsorship dollars and seven per cent of broadcast coverage. There is a direct correlation between the two.

*****

When is the next FIFA World Cup? Google it and the answer will be 2026. Men always being the default position. Even though the women, as mentioned, play later this year.

Another question: who has scored the most goals in international football? Cristiano Ronaldo? Canadian Christine Sinclair, despite what the search engine initially spits out.

Much like proud tennis feminist Andy Murray was asked about being the first tennis player to win two Olympic gold medals and answered that, ahem, Venus and Serena Williams had both won more. Gender assumed, not specified.

Indeed, a group called “Correct the Internet” is behind a global movement designed to highlight and fix the inconsistency of searchable facts that disadvantage sportswomen, and improve their visibility as a result.

Attempts to challenge the status quo prompt Palmer to apply the “rising tide lifts all boats” saying to sports seeing what rivals are providing for female athletes and being forced to confront the probability that they need to be doing more.

“In a way, all the big sports are looking at each other and going, ‘Well, they’re supporting women, are you?’ It’s like a race now to be the first and do it well.’’

Which brings us back to Pearce’s AFLW, and while Palmer has enormous respect for the league’s investment in its seven-year-old women’s competition, the fact it still lasts just 10 rounds, and rising pay packets still lag stratospheres below — average wages $71,935 in 2022 and $372,224 respectively — the men leaves her wishing it would be ramped up further still.

“Go harder,’’ is Palmer’s AFL wish. “Show them all up, show up every single sport in this country, because guess what that does? Generates upward pressure.’’

While too late for Pearce, she is nevertheless exceedingly grateful for opportunities she could never have imagined, given that women and girls had been conditioned to accept that they didn’t belong in footy. Not really.

So it was that when Wandiligong’s favourite daughter got there in 2017’s inaugural season, she was determined not to let down those who had gone before but never had the same chance.

While also representing the many who would come next.

TOMORROW: THE GOLD STANDARD, THE FUTURE AND BRISBANE 2032.