Men and women are still not playing on a level field
For a snapshot of the dark forces still assailing women’s sport, it was worth studying a short bulletin yesterday from Melbourne. There, the Herald Sun, the city’s largest-circulation daily newspaper, decided it could no longer permit online comments on articles about women’s Australian rules football. In a startling rebuke to its own readers, an editorial explained: “The measure was taken because of constant trolling, harassment and disgraceful commentary.” Never mind that the sport itself counts as an astounding commercial success, with match attendances over 35,000. In 2020, there are still too many faceless vigilantes hell-bent on consigning it to oblivion.
These inequities are not always manifested in mindless vitriol. Often, prejudice is at its most pernicious when it bleeds into the structures of sport, entrenching double standards so deeply that they pass almost unnoticed. One needs only to use the past 48 hours as a frame of reference.
It took mere moments for the Six Nations, scrambling for a response to the coronavirus outbreak, to shelve any notion of holding next Saturday’s game between Italy and England behind closed doors. A boisterous Roman ambience is too precious to the tournament’s identity for a potential title-decider to take place in an empty echo chamber. As such, indefinite postponement was preferable.
So far, so uncontroversial. Until we remember that in the women’s tournament last month, organisers were quite content for Scotland and England to rattle around in a deserted, snowbound Murrayfield while Storm Ciara did her worst. Would the men’s teams have been reduced to the same fate? The sheer smorgasbord of indignities inflicted upon women’s rugby, from the absence of a Six Nations title sponsor to the compulsion to play in a blizzard, should steer you towards the likely answer.
In cricket, there is a similarly gnawing sense that the Women’s Twenty20 World Cup is being treated as the poor relation, with England washed out of a semi-final against India by a Sydney deluge. “We’ve been bridesmaids before, but to lose out to rain is a new feeling,” said Heather Knight, the England captain. At one level, this appears a case of administrative oversight, with an absence of rest days leaving no margin for matches to be rescheduled. But it is a safe bet that come the men’s T20 World Cup in Australia in October – when
Sydney’s average monthly rainfall is 40 per cent less than for March – the governing bodies will have found a better way.
The disparities can be subtle. Take, for instance, Norwich City’s FA Cup penalty shoot-out at Tottenham Hotspur this week. At first glance, the dominant strand of this drama was not one of gender imbalance. Consider, though, how for several kicks, Norwich goalkeeper Tim Krul strayed so far off his line that he was practically in a different postcode. Each time, referee Paul Tierney let the transgression go unpunished.
Rewind to the women’s World Cup last summer, and there was little chance of the same latitude being shown. This was a tournament that Fifa was happy to use as an experiment for the latest rules on encroachment. In France, where video assistant referees greatly increased the probability of any offence being detected, a goalkeeper could be booked for advancing so much as an inch off her line before the penalty was taken. The consequences were stark, especially when Lee Alexander, Scotland’s goalkeeper, moved the tiniest fraction forward against a penalty by Argentina’s Florencia Bonsegundo. The kick was ordered to be retaken, Argentina scored, and the Scots’ chance of a maiden World Cup quarter-final was gone.
So, one rule for men, another for women. Just look at the make-up of the International Football Association Board, the guardians of the game’s laws, which convened in Belfast for its annual meeting. At the table were 28 men and one woman. The assumption of female attendees’ secondary importance was made plain by the official itinerary for delegates’ partners. “Ladies depart for coffee at the Titanic Hotel,” the 10am entry read. Then, at 1.30pm: “Ladies return by coach for lunch.” At least it was a leap ahead from last year’s equivalent event in Aberdeen, where wives and girlfriends were taken to a flower-arranging class.
Ifab is a 134-year-old institution, but sadly its stand for equality is still frozen in time, circa 1886. If the most pressing decisions in football are being taken almost exclusively by men, it is hardly unexpected that they end up benefiting the men’s game at the expense of the women’s.
For all the vast recent strides accomplished in the projection and profile of women’s sport, there is a feeling that the battle to reshape attitudes has barely begun. If you are in any doubt, look at the situation in Australia, where a newspaper has seen fit to censor the abuse on its website, weary of any positive story about female athletes being defaced. The time-honoured practice of forcing men’s and women’s sport into separate silos has bred a plethora of systemic inequalities. It is an imperative of this more enlightened age that they are dismantled, and fast.
For all the recent strides there is a feeling that the battle to change attitudes has barely begun