Female athletes stealing from men? I call it equal pay

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/01/female-athletes-stealing-from-men-equal-pay

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Here is a fun little paradox to get you in the mood for the weekend: when is equal pay “sexist”? When it’s for female athletes. Boom! Am I right, lads?

This was the verdict of a sports commentator in the Times on Wednesday, reacting to a BBC Sport survey that found male athletes are awarded more prize money than their female counterparts in 30% of sports. Now, some might feel that 30% is sufficiently unequal, but this commentator feels it is not unequal enough. Not only should men win more money than women, he wrote, but more of them should win a lot more: “To deprive Federer of income by handing it to female players is not far from daylight robbery,” he spluttered. Yes, because if one word is universally associated with Roger Federer, it is “deprived”. And how about those women, eh? Expecting to be “handed” equal prize money, just because they won the same tennis tournament! Later in the same column, these lazy, gold-digging female athletes are described as “snaffling money from men”. Tchuh – typical women.

This low-hanging fruit of a column is instructive, on several levels. For one, it tells us that a British sports columnist has a remarkably dismissive attitude towards female tennis players. Serena Williams (“America’s Greatest Athlete” – the New Yorker), Li Na (cover star of Time magazine’s 2013 100 Most Influential People), Maria Sharapova (winner of all four grand slams) and Petra Kvitova, this year’s Wimbledon champion, are dismissed as barely known, and for them pay parity would be “no more coherent than paying Steph Houghton, the captain of the Manchester City women’s team, the same as Sergio Agüero”.

But then, this same columnist once described women’s tennis as having “a soft-porn dimension”, featuring “Amazonian goddesses, with their lithe and assertive athleticism” straight out of “adolescent (and non-adolescent) male fantasy”. It must be hard remembering women’s names when lost in “(non-adolescent) male fantasy”.

More usefully, he lines up all the tired arguments against pay equality in sport so they can be neatly knocked down.

For example, critics – from the above columnist to grammatically challenged men on social media – love to cite the fact that women play fewer sets in the grand slams as the reason they shouldn’t get equal prize money (which they only finally achieved in 2007, mind). Now, leaving aside the fact that female players have repeatedly asked to play five sets only for officials to reject their request, I was unaware that athletes were paid by the hour. Has anyone told Usain Bolt that he should be awarded 1% of what Mo Farah makes on the track? No, because athletes are paid not by the clock, but what broadcasters and sponsors think they are worth. To say that female athletes should be paid less is to say that they are worth less – and I’d like to see someone tell Serena Williams in person that she’s not as valuable as Federer, let alone Stan Wawrinka.

No one – seriously, NO ONE – is suggesting that female footballers should be paid the same as male Premier League players, although the disparity should not be so big. When Manchester City won the Premier League this year, they were awarded £24m, while Liverpool’s champion women’s team won a feminine, sexy zero. “Market forces! Market forces!” bleat the anti-equal-pay brigade. “Not sexism!” say certain commentators.

Let’s look at what’s behind sport’s famously unsexist market forces. Men’s team sports attract media coverage, which brings public interest, which in turn leads to sponsorship deals, which lead to more media coverage. For women’s team sports it is the inverse: a vicious circle of no media coverage means no public interest means no sponsorship deals, means no media coverage. This is not – if you’ll forgive a sporting metaphor here – a level playing field. The way to level it is to accord female athletes more media coverage and more financial rewards, which will in turn foster public interest. You know, like what happened with men’s football.

When female athletes are paid unequally – or nothing – it compounds the very clear message that they are seen as lesser: less interesting, less important, less real – and this is true in sports where it seems there is parity. Serena Williams made $11m in sponsorship deals last year – poor ol’ deprived Federer made $52m. Ask yourself why it is the men’s, and not the women’s, final that is the big closing event in tennis grand slams, or why the men’s 100m gets so much Olympics coverage and the women’s is barely acknowledged. Compare the coverage of England’s women cricketers winning the Ashes this year with the amount devoted to Kevin Pietersen’s silly book.

Heck, women weren’t even allowed to compete in various sports until recently: women’s football was banned by the FA on FA-affiliated grounds until 1971; Olympic women’s marathons were banned until 1984; and the women’s ski-jump was kept out of the Olympics until 2014. Yes, 2014 (“It seems not appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view,” demurred the International Ski Federation president in 2005, clutching his handkerchief.) On Thursday Frank Warren wrote in the Independent that women shouldn’t box. On Tuesday an FA official was suspended for telling a female referee that “Your place is in the kitchen”. But remember! Sexism is not the root problem here.

But what do I know – silly-billy gold-digging woman that I am, with reproductive organs that need protection from ski jumps by staying in the kitchen? When will we snaffling ladies understand? When female athletes win less money in the same competitions, it’s not because of sexism – it’s because they’re women and therefore deemed less interesting from the start. And that, you see, is different.

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