Parity on the pitch

BCCI's move could be a trendsetter

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) deserves praise for introducing equal pay for men and women players who represent the country at international levels in all three formats of the game. In a country that consistently ranks low on the global gender gap index, this marks an enlightened step forward. Till now women cricketers in the highest annual-contract bracket earned about half what their male counterparts earned in the lowest bracket. The BCCI, in fact, joins New Zealand and Australia in introducing gender pay parity. But given that the BCCI is the world’s richest cricketing body, it could well become the trendsetter for other cricketing bodies.

Though undoubtedly progressive, this move must be viewed as only the first small step towards realistically equalising career earnings for men and women. This is essentially a function of two related developments. The first is how intensively the women’s game is promoted in terms of marketing campaigns and broadcasting time; both have expanded significantly over the past decade. The second is the trajectory towards the overwhelming popularity of the T20 format and the concomitant privatisation of the game via the popular franchise tournament, the Indian Premier League (IPL). The BCCI’s plans to introduce an IPL for women will fully test the concept of gender pay parity. That’s because in the larger world of the sports industry, which is driven by private money, the earnings disparity between men and women (with some honourable exceptions such as badminton) is still a bridge too far.
 

Tennis is a good example. Much is made of the fact that men and women get equal prize money at the four Grand Slam events, though women play three setters to men’s five setters and both men and women’s games get equal coverage. But one rung down, in the more frequent Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP, the men’s organisation) and the Women’s Tennis Association, where both men and women play three setters, the latter earn up to 75 per cent less. Yet these are the bread-and-butter tournaments that earn players their ranking points. No surprise, then, that Serena Williams retired with 23 Grand Slams but netted $450 million in career earnings to Roger Federer’s $1.1 billion and 20 Grand Slams. The same is true for women’s football. Although the women’s version of the sport is gaining traction with stadium and TV audiences, only a handful of national football federations pay men and women equally.

But within the privately-owned club system, which really drives football in Europe, the disparity is stark. In the Women’s Super League, the equivalent of the English Premier League, the average salary is £30,000, lower than the average salary of the lowest-ranked team in the men’s game. The highest earner in the women’s game, the USA’s Carli Lloyd, earns £400,000 a year, nowhere near Lionel Messi’s £62 million per year before endorsement deals. It is easy to predict that even if the women’s IPL gains in popularity, it will be many decades before a top female cricketer will be able to match Virat Kohli’s earnings of Rs 261.03 crore (including Rs 238.7 crore in endorsements) last year, a season in which he struggled for runs. Still, equal pay by the national federation may well set the ball rolling for women to get there.