Equal pay is on the way despite doom merchants
New Zealand women rugby players will see changes for the better.
Arugby club in Northland on a Friday night in July, 1990. Wallabies Michael Lynagh and Greg Martin are guest speaking.
The main sponsor of the club is a local businesswoman. But she won’t be in the large crowd in the main hall. Women are banned, so to hear the highly entertaining Aussies speak she has to join the ladies in the kitchen (as the club chairman called them in a thank you speech) and pick up what she can through the serving hatch.
And here’s what, in 2017, feels so deeply strange. Nobody seemed to think there was anything weird about what was happening.
My memories of that night were prompted when considering some of the huffing and puffing this week about equal pay for women in sport.
The day will come when society will find it extraordinary that women in general didn’t get equal pay in New Zealand, and the same astonishment will apply to a lack of fair and equal pay in women’s sport.
Most of the arguments against equal pay in sport (‘‘If the new Sports Minister’s idea of pay parity is giving everyone the same wage then we are in a world of trouble,’’ was one commentator’s Doomsday take) reflect the thought process of those who know the cost of everything, and the value of nothing. It’s the right and decent thing to do. Full stop.
The fact is that sport has rarely treated women as equals. And it’s surely no coincidence that, all over the world, males overwhelmingly run sport. The result is that some male officials have been, at best, patronising, and, at worst, misogynistic.
Patronising? Women were tough enough to have babies, but were considered too fragile to run beyond 800 metres at the Olympics until 1972, when the first women’s 1500m event was introduced. And the women’s marathon didn’t come to the Games until 1984.
Misogynistic? In 1967 Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to enter the Boston marathon. There was no mention of gender on the entry form, but American athletics rules of the day banned women from running further than a mile and a half. About 6km into the race she was attacked.
‘‘A huge man with bared teeth crazy person, but the race codirector, Jock Semple. ‘‘I’m not opposed to women’s athletics,’’ he’d say, ‘‘but they don’t belong [running] with men.’’
On the day Switzer was able to carry on and finish the race, after Semple was smacked out of the way by Switzer’s boyfriend of the time.
As they always do, times changed, and when women were officially welcomed into the Boston marathon in 1972 Semple was still in charge, swearing he was comfortable with the new era.
Accepting that what was the norm years, or even decades, ago, may no longer be the right thing to do is usually blindingly obvious, but history also shows that there are some who can’t accept new realities.
Having grown up and lived all my life being offered all the privileges that being a white male in New Zealand entails, I’m regularly amused by the wittering of our own ‘‘That’s PC Gone Mad’’ brigade.
They may be astonished to know that a BBC investigation in June discovered that 83 per cent of world events (ranging from alpine skiing to athletics to track cycling to Wimbledon) have equal prize money for men and women. Even the Boston marathon introduced GETTY IMAGES equal money, in 1986. Yet somehow the sun keeps rising all over the world.
Close to home, over many years, New Zealand rugby has done a lot to please those who think the world’s better off without any transformation, ranging from banning Maori players for tours to South Africa from 1928 to 1960, to keeping players’ wives and partners out of All Black after-test functions. In 1983 after a Lions test in Wellington the women were told to wait in a lounge bar until the players had finished the official dinner.
While it’s unlikely there’ll be a Black Fern signing a milliondollar contract in the very near future, women in rugby will see changes for the better, and not just because it’s the right thing to do.
Women make up 50.8 per cent of the New Zealand population. Rugby, we all must realise now, is a professional, commercial exercise. Can any successful business, as New Zealand Rugby is, afford to offend slightly more than half of its customer base?
And anyway, isn’t being fair and encouraging to women in all sports, including rugby, what you’d hope to expect in what is, after all, the 21st century?