ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL
A significant gap remains between men’s and women’s wages in sport, write Emma Greenwood and Jamie Pandaram
OF course, Sally Fitzgibbons uses a surfing analogy. “You know when the tide goes out and all that water is just sucking out and you’re like, what’s going to happen next?”
She’s talking about pay parity, introduced on the World Surf League’s championship tour in 2019 in a groundbreaking move.
The WSL became one of the few sports in the world to pay its elite men and women equally, and continues to set the pace internationally, along with tennis – which pays men and women equally at the grand slams but not all events – three years ago as part of a commitment to gender equality.
“When (pay parity) was announced, it was like this big rush,” said Fitzgibbons, a threetime tour runner-up.
“This big wave of things (happened) and I think it was just a big push, like an incoming tide, not just the drip, drip pace, it was like something was going to change significantly.
“That was a proud moment for me to be a part of a sport that decided to stand up and be a leader in that space.”
The same year, the thenFootball Federation Australia (now Football Australia), inked a landmark pay parity deal in its collective bargaining agreement with the Professional Footballers Association for international duties, with the Matildas and Socceroos also sharing an equal split of commercial revenues.
A year earlier, Rugby Australia ensured their men’s and women’s sevens players entered the program on the same base contracts.
Olympic gold medallist and 2022 world sevens player of the year Charlotte Caslick said her six-figure salary allowed her to live in Bondi close to training facilities and set up her life after rugby with a cattle farm.
“The girls now that are joining the program have the same minimum wage as the men, so everyone that joins is completely equal to the boys, which is really cool,” Caslick said. “It allows you to live more comfortably. Previously, your whole wage would just be going on rent. Now we’re getting paid really well, that isn’t a burden, it’s a stress that’s taken away from your day to day.”
A few years on though, little has really changed.
For all the exciting moves in women’s professional sport over the past fortnight – the historic Women’s Premier League cricket auction, the federal government’s $2m injection into the Wallaroos’ program and the NRL’s announcement of momentous pay and structural changes for its NRLW program – there continues to be a significant gap between men’s and women’s wages in sport, just as in the rest of society.
A 2019 study found the fulltime gender pay gap in “Sports and Recreation Activities” was 30 per cent – almost double the national average.
In addition, women make up only a fraction of board chairs and CEOs in Australian sporting organisations.
Most women have a second job, or juggle tertiary studies with their training and playing commitments to ensure they are
not left behind when their playing days are over. That’s particularly true on the domestic scene, where pay for women lags significantly behind the men.
Just a year before the elite Super Netball competition was launched, Gretel Bueta was cock-a-hoop after winning a second successive national league title with the Queensland Firebirds.
Bueta was being lauded for her part in the victories but her brothers – AFL players Kurt and Joel Tippett – “felt sorry” for her.
“We’d just won an ANZ championships back to back and I was still on, I think, 5 per cent of what they were on,” Bueta said of her pay at the time.
The introduction of Super Netball – the world’s premier domestic league – raised the stakes and Bueta, widely regarded as one of the best shooters in the world, is one of the better paid players.
But it’s still not her sole source of income and while both brothers have long since retired, her pay remains a long way off what they were earning.
“But that was the beauty of it,” she said. “I played because I loved it, I didn’t play for the money and I still don’t. “Even though the sport has grown, you still have that (reason) why you play and it’s definitely not because of (money).”
Things are changing though, and most women believe there has never been a more exciting time to be involved in sport given the myriad options they can now pursue professionally.
Caslick said Rugby Australia’s decision to pay women the same base rate as men allowed all athletes to concentrate on performance.
“When you want to perform as an athlete, you want your mental and physical space looked after,” she said. “And I feel like financial worries ... stresses out a lot of people that don’t even have to then use their body as their main tool.
“We’ve been lucky to have that pay gap equalled, and I get paid really well, so I’ve just been able to set up other parts of my life for when I finish.”
Fitzgibbons believes women are achieving equality through performance: “In terms of fighting for that equality, I don’t know where and when we really pushed the needle but we just had to keep showing up for that.
“We did that as a group and we made (gaining equality) like the world title. We made that Cup that driving force and so if we all try that hard to get it, it was going to create those rivalries … and that just kept moving that ball around.”