I’m still not over the Matilda’s incredible run in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. 40% of the nation tuned in to watch their heartbreaking semi-final loss to England. People a little older than me have been saying the hype feels similar to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which went on to have a lasting effect on Australian sport for years (and on our national identity forever).
But for this to truly be the turning point for elite and professional women’s sport in Australia, we have to have a long-term mindset. The challenges that faced female athletes prior to July 2023 largely still remain. With so many eyes and so much interest in women’s sport, how can we leverage this moment to improve the long term outlook of the women’s elite sports pipeline? Not just for soccer, but all sports?
What’s holding female athletes back?
Uncontrollable factors, like talent and luck, play a big part in the journey from suburban Under 7s to Sam Kerr status. But there two major challenges facing women on the pathway to professional competition that we can control to ensure Australia produces as many top level athletes as possible.
COMPENSATION: Professor Tracy Taylor is one of Australia’s leading sports academics, and says the lack of both financial and support structures force talented women to abandon careers before they even really get going. “When we were interviewing women athletes playing in national leagues across a range of sports, we just kept hearing the need for a pathway to becoming professional whereby you’re able to live on your wage. So you’re not having to balance a dual sporting career and a job.” This isn’t about being paid once you’re at the professional level, but rather ensuring that people can afford to get to that level.
To support their sporting journey, many athletes – of all genders – choose jobs that offer more flexibility in hours. But these are typically not jobs that will provide stable careers post-sport; which is another reason why athletes, particularly those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, have to abandon professional sport before they really make it. Professor Taylor also points out that as child and family care commitments are typically women’s responsibilities, taking flexible jobs that don’t offer things like parental or carer’s leave makes life extra difficult for would-be female athletes. If you don’t have extensive social support, it’s impossible to find the time you need to get you to the professional level.
For the talented and fortunate athletes that do make it to the professional level, being paid fairly is still a problem. But even though we focus this discussion on comparing it to mens’ competitions, I don’t think that’s even the main issue. We’re better off asking what we want female athletes to achieve, what’s required to achieve it, and whether they get paid enough to execute?
“One of the things that we did hear a lot was women initially feeling very grateful for the opportunity to enter into national leagues,” Professor Taylor explains. “But then the pay increases were not necessarily in parity with the expectation increases. So you get paid a bit more, but then you’re expected to train more, to travel more, to put your life on hold more.”
An athlete’s performance delivers benefit to the public or private teams that they compete for. It’s work. So if the Australian swimming team expects Arianne Titmus to win Olympic Gold, do they pay her enough for the time required to do that? If the Matildas or the Hockeyroos or the Opals are expected to win a world championship, do they get paid enough to do that?
LACK OF WOMEN-SPECIFIC RESEARCH: The significant gender gap in sports science and research (reportedly only 6% of sport studies focus on women) means there is a lot we still don’t know about the impact of technique, coaching styles, psychology, strategy and physiology in women’s sports. Injuries are common career-enders. but most exercise and sporting knowledge is based on developing boys and men into higher performers, not girls and women.
The good news is progress is underway on sports research, especially when it comes to product and equipment development. For example, it’s only in the past five years we’ve had football boots designed specifically for women’s feet (as opposed to a sized down version of a men’s boot). Something so fundamental to soccer, AFL, rugby and more can have a huge impact on injuries and the ‘one-percenters’ of elite performance.
Jordie Katcher (Brown) is Global Vice President Women’s Sport Apparel at Nike, and says the technology advancements are helping bridge many of these research and development gaps. “We’re able to look at the athlete’s body in motion, specifically things like heat maps and sweat maps of the female athlete’s body and understand how to tune the breathability and the stretch, the mobility of the garment to where the athletes need it most.”
These developments may start with elite sport in mind, based on testing and feedback from high performance athletes, but the end result is knowledge and products that solve problems that take non-pro women and girls out. The Leak Protect: Period fabric evolved from a research insight that menstruating players would spend up to nine minutes of a 90-minute match worrying about leakage. “It’s an ultra-thin absorbent liner incorporated into the under short you wear underneath your kit… We couldn’t just test it with water that had red dye in it. We had to make sure that the viscosity of blood could be held, so we had to create [a blood-like substance] to test the material in our labs.” Having these kinds of products available to general consumers too will keep more women and girls in amateur sport longer, increasing their chance of making it to high level competition.
Having these kinds of products available to general consumers too will keep more women and girls in amateur sport longer, increasing their chance of making it to high level competition.
How do we fix it?
A lot of the issues boil down to money. To play sport at a professional or elite level is a privilege, but it’s also an important cultural touchstone for the country and often provides genuine moments of community connection and national solidarity – these have immense benefits to the public.
So the first solution is increased government funding. But as governments look for a return on their funding investment, most of the money will continue to flow to sports where we have a longer history of success (like swimming) or an opportunity to win internationally. “If you look at the sports that have seen dramatic change in the number of women playing. take something like Rugby Union. Once Rugby 7s was admitted into the Olympics as a sport, there was attention on ‘How do we grow the women’s game so that we can be successful?’” says Professor Taylor.
That makes things difficult for mid-level athletes who are not yet world class and less popular sporting codes. “It is possible if you get strong commitment from the national governing bodies, but they then have to have the money to be able to do that and not all sports are in that same position. And it’s no different for the men to a degree, there are many sports that both men and women compete in where neither gets great government support.”
Corporate Sponsorship becomes an attractive option to fill the gap – and it’s one that actually beginning to favour female athletes. While every company wants to be the sponsor that backs a winning team, increasingly brands are looking for ambassadors that align with their values. “In men’s sport [domestically] there’s been a lot of issues with behavior that doesn’t resonate with sponsors. Whereas female athletes, at least at the moment, are demonstrating a set of values that organizations want to buy into and wanna be part of.”
Seeking out sponsorship as an individual or team brings its own challenges, though. What happens when the sponsor’s values don’t align with the athlete’s beliefs, as happened with star player Donnell Wallam protested against Netball Australia’s sponsorship deal with Gina Rineheart’s mining company, Hancock Protesting. The company is also sponsoring the entire Australia OIympic team for the 2024 Paris Summer Games and 2026 Milan Winter Games. How does that sit with the many Australian olympians who signed this open letter demanding action on climate to protect the future of Australian sport?
Ultimately, Australia has to keep women playing all levels of sport longer. Funding, sponsorship and opportunities can only be given to women if we’re in the game. Moments like the Matildas’ incredible World Cup run will see a spike in grassroots participation (for sports other than soccer, too). Grace Gil, commentator and former Canberra United player, says the national bodies, clubs and government need to be ready for it. “It then needs an increase in administrators to support the increase in players, because when we don’t keep up with things like governance, infrastructure, facilities, new people won’t have a good experience and will end up moving away from the game.”
This truly feels like a moment for women’s sport that can be leveraged for the long term. “There is a legacy piece needed to ensure all of this continues to happen,” Gil says. “I think if there’s the right investment at grassroots level, with girls and boys and young players getting the support they need and at a cost that they can afford, then that’s gonna lift the quality across the board.”
What role does the public play?
Sport has cultural significance in Australia. And that is something we the people have a lot control over, telling the government and corporations where to put their money.
You won’t be surprised to hear that the starting point is to just get out and support women’s sport. It doesn’t matter what it is – attend events, watch broadcasts, follow your faves on social media. This is all fuel for the second step: talk about it.
Cultural relevance is about much more than just game day attendance figures or broadcast numbers. Discussing the weekend’s AFL and NRL men’s matches is considered normal small talk because a lot of people in Australia are vocal in their participation of those sports, whether it’s watching or attending games or keeping up to date with news. Sharing your interest in women’s sport with other people normalises it as a topic of discussion.
It doesn’t have to take place in a ‘boring’, stats-flexing way either. The excellent memes throughout the Women’s World Cup made it bigger than just a sports tournament, easily distributing highlights and talking points to people in a highly accessible way. You don’t need to know every rule or every player’s name to understand the jokes being made, allowing people with zero knowledge to get involved in the game, many of them for the first time ever. Niche online discourse and memes have a knack for turning small things into bigger cultural moments. Fun fact: even though it felt like everyone was talking about Succession, the finale only had around 2.9 million viewers in the U.S – not even close to the estimated 46 million who watched the Game of Thrones finale. But the show seemed so much bigger than it was largely due to the online memes and discourse that drove huge hype.
We can use other elements of culture to propel women’s sport forward. Fashion is a huge tool – the way street style has made wearing NBA jerseys cool, or vintage motorsports tees have become a fashion statement. ‘Jersey culture’, which stylist Jana Bartolo defines as treating sports jerseys “as a wardrobe staple, worn to express your identity and support… like the way you’d wear your favorite band T-shirt” is another way to be make female athlete’s part of mainstream culture. “You don’t necessarily need to be native to sport, you might not necessarily know all the ins and outs, but you’re supporting these women that are dominating their fields. That’s really cool in itself, and it’s also a nice introduction for someone that may not know everything about the game.”
Making small talk, memes, wearing official and unofficial merch… these are all little things we can do to weave our favourite women’s teams or athletes into the fabric of mainstream culture in a way that government bodies and corporations simply cannot.
And finally, we have to be patient. The development of women’s sports has come a long way in a relatively short amount of time, and we don’t want to rush it to meet the much longer history of men’s sport. “It’s a really delicate conversation because you always get that group that comes out and says, ‘Well, it’s not as fast as the men’s game, why are we gonna invest as much money in that?’ It’s a balancing act. The first thing to remember is we’re chasing our tail to get to a point where [a sport] could be right now, if women had been supported to play in history – which we weren’t,” Gil says. Growing too fast can actually harm the professional sport pathway if results are not as expected, causing interest to drop off and funding to dry up.
“Even in the last 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of change and I think sometimes we forget that we’ve come a long way,” Professor Taylor says. “One of the Rugby League players we interviewed said their role models 10 years ago were men, and they were in the same place – working as a mechanic all day and training at night, and they didn’t have the same opportunities that the male players do now. So we just have to realize this takes a bit of time.”
Smart people read more:
‘Felt alienated by the men’s game’: how the culture of women’s sport has driven record Matildas viewership – The Conversation
Australian Women Stop Playing Sport at 15. How Do We Change That?
Our ‘invisible’ champions give diversity a sporting chance – Sydney Morning Herald
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