From suffrage to surfing, equality fight goes on
Women go after same pay in big wave contest
SAN FRANCISCO – Bianca Valenti surfs waves that are as tall as five-story buildings. That’s a 50-foot wall of water. Look up, and think about it.
Doing this makes her feel alive, even though she knows she could die. That’s especially true at Mavericks, a killer big wave competition poised to happen any day now just off the California coast near Half Moon Bay.
“Mavs is it, I’m so stoked,” says Valenti, 31, as she eyes the comparatively small, 12-foot waves breaking off Ocean Beach in San Francisco during a practice session. “And this one’s really special.”
That’s because at this year’s Mavericks Challenge, Valenti and her fellow female surfers will be – in a true first for the male-dominated sport – competing for equal prize money, $25,000 per winner, after years of earning as little as a tenth of male category purses. That’s if they were invited at all.
The milestone is the fruit of a long battle waged by Valenti and others. It lands when women are pushing cultural boundaries through movements such as Times Up and #MeToo, which have advocated for equal pay and an end to sexual abuse in the workplace.
Despite recent strides, equal pay for women remains a problem everywhere from athletic fields to executive suites.
In the world of sports, although tennis star Serena Williams has been lead-
ing a vocal charge, women still earn less than men outside major tournaments. And players on the always dominant U.S. women’s national soccer team also have complained of wage discrimination.
For Valenti and other female surfer activists, there were many days when pushing to get the World Surf League, the private governing body that oversees professional surfing, to agree to equal pay seemed more daunting than the giant waves at California’s Mavericks, Maui’s Jaws and Portugal’s Nazare.
“I almost got tired of fighting after 10 or so years, trying to get into competitions where we weren’t allowed, but I just kept going,” says Andrea Moller, 39, a Brazilian pro big wave surfer from Oahu, Hawaii, who has joined Valenti for her pre-Mavericks practice session in the frigid gray surf that hardcore San Francisco regulars adore.
“Some people would tell me that by trying to get the (prize) pie redistributed, I was ruining it for everyone,” says the steely-eyed Moller. “But I would just say, ‘That’s wrong. We’re fighting for the industry. People love watching women surf big waves, so the whole sport will grow.’ ”
That “pay equity lifts all surfboards” philosophy has long driven the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing, or CEWS, an organization formed in 2016 by six women including pro surfers Valenti, Moller, Keala Kennelly and Paige Alms, as well as attorney Karen Tynan and San Mateo County Harbor Commissioner Sabrina Brennan.
Last summer, the group successfully petitioned the California Coastal Commission to put a pay-equity condition on the permit that the World Surf League was seeking for its Mavericks Challenge.
Pushing for change at Mavericks was deliberate. Since the competition started there two decades back, women have never been invited to officially compete. And things haven’t been much better elsewhere on the surfing contest calendar.
In a presentation CEWS made to the World Surf League in September, the disparity for women was highlighted by a variety of stark examples.
At the 2018 Billabong Junior contest at Ballito, South Africa, the woman who won made half of what her male counterpart took home. And at this year’s Puerto Escondido Cup in Mexico, Valenti made 75 percent less than the male winner for surfing the same wave on the same day, $1,750 compared to
$7,000.
At first, the World Surf League balked, retracting its permit application for Mavericks. But not long after, the organization announced in early September that it had decided to grant pay equity across all of its global events.
For its upcoming Championship Tour, the league said it would earmark
$607,800 for men’s competitions to be split among 36 surfers, and $303,900 for
18 female entrants.
“It took the WSL doing the right thing to get everyone in line with the new program,” says Brennan. “The good news in all this is things are changing.”
World Surf League CEO Sophie Goldschmidt says its decision is part of a continuum, pointing out that since the organization came under new ownership in 2013, it has increased women’s prize money by 153 percent, while men’s monies rose by 22 percent.
“Equal prize money is a huge step forward for both surfing and more broadly the world of sport,” says Goldschmidt. “We want to be at the forefront of pushing for equality in all walks of life, starting on the waves.”
‘Dangerous and terrifying’
“Mavericks is fearsome, period,” says Alex Wilson, deputy editor at The Surfer’s Journal. “It’s one of the most dangerous and terrifying places in the world to be a surfer. Anyone who paddles out there understands you don’t surf a wave like that unless you have the mettle and skill to match its ferocity.”
Wilson welcomes the fact that women will be treated as equals at a contest that when first launched in 1999 by its founder, Jeff Clark, was dubbed “Men Who Ride Mountains.”
“Any movement toward a society, whether that’s in surfing or in culture more broadly, where people are accepted for who they are and for the skill sets and talents they have, and are compensated accordingly without labels, is long overdue,” he says.
Pro surfers Valenti, Moller and Ken- nelly would agree, and they welcome the ability to earn as much as men in upcoming WSL events. But, they all say this won’t change their lives.
Pro surfing’s harsh reality
The reality of pro surfing is that travel costs alone would eat up most of any prize money, and that’s only if you win. What allows most pros to train and travel is sponsorship dollars, and that still eludes many women in the sport.
So Valenti works at her father’s Italian restaurant north of San Francisco as a wine expert. Moller is a trained paramedic who had to find someone to fill her shift so she could get ready for Mavericks.
Moller also has worked as a waitress. When she first started surfing at Jaws more than a decade back, a place where it’s a must to have a friend ride a jet ski to pluck you out of the surf, Moller saved her tip money for months to buy a used jet ski.
“I had a 1-year-old at home at the time to feed and take care of, so I was trying to juggle everything so that I could tend to her but also pursue my passion,” she says.
Kennelly is a titan of her sport, and yet she has to work two jobs – she’s a DJ and a bartender in Honolulu – to make ends meet.
“Most of the men (surfers) I know have big sponsors and don’t have to work, they can just focus on their surfing,” she says. “I can’t imagine how much better I’d be if I didn’t have to struggle to pay my rent.”
But she allows that the WSL’s pay equity decision could start turning the tide, given that women appearing as equal competitors in more global events could lead to more media exposure and then bigger sponsorship opportunities.
There is a palpable sense from all of these pioneering women surfers that change is in the air, if not for them then at least for the next generation of wave riders.
Moller, whose daughter is now 15, says she never wanted her to be interested in sports as a career because of how little money was in it.
“But I look at my daughter now and think, wow, there’s hope,” she says softly. “I feel like, ‘If that becomes your dream like it was mine, go chase it.’”
Sachi Cunningham is a surfer and professional photographer who has been following these women for the past four years in preparation for her documentary, tentatively titled “She Change.”
“There’s no doubt that the whole cultural shift and the #MeToo zeitgeist has given some force to the CEWS movement,” Cunningham says, adding that she hopes this pay-equity win might trickle down to other sports.
“The bottom line is, today a 5-yearold girl who grows up wanting to surf professionally has prospects that are a whole lot different than say Keala’s, who is among the very best in the world at what she does and can barely pay the bills,” she says. “Now, at least, there’s a path.”
As the waves thunder off Ocean Beach, Valenti goes through her stretching routine in the ochre-colored sand.
She recalls her own childhood dreams, when as a 7-year-old she plastered a poster on her wall of her hero – Kelly Slater, perhaps the best male surfer ever.
“I had the talent, but I soon realized I couldn’t be Kelly because of the inequities, less media attention, fewer chances to enter contests, not many sponsorship packages,” she says, more matter-of-factly than as a lament.
“Our society likes to rank people,” she says, pulling the wetsuit away from her neck. “A contest is a way to do that, and without that it’s hard to build loyalty and assign value.”
Now, Valenti and her peers finally are being recognized for their brilliance, bravery and for what they long have been – Women Who Ride Mountains.
“Some people would tell me that by trying to get the (prize) pie redistributed, I was ruining it for everyone. But ... we’re fighting for the industry.” Andrea Moller