On top of the world: Institutional support has empowered women's cricket

The nation may justly be proud of the historic victory of the Indian women’s cricket team at the ICC Women’s World Cup but note should also be taken of the institutional support that has made this hitherto male-dominated sport a viable profession for talented young sportswomen from all walks of life. Old timers recall the days when women’s cricket was considered an unprofessional side-show with scant access to equipment and even less money — with presenter Mandira Bedi famously donating her commercial earnings for the women’s team to buy air-tickets for a tour of England. In that sense, today’s heroes — such as Harmanpreet Kaur, Shafali Verma, Smriti Mandhana, Jemimah Rodrigues, or  Deepti Sharma — stand on the shoulders of players like Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami, both record holders, and players such as Diana Eduljee, Shantha Rangaswamy, and Nutan Gavaskar, who fought to bring women’s cricket to the forefront of administrators’ attention.

 

Now with the women’s team set to win ₹90 crore in prize money and cash rewards, and with endorsement deals starting to roll in, it is worth reflecting on the initiatives by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), an institution not best-known for reforming zeal, to promote the women’s game. In 2022, the BCCI introduced equal match fees for both women and men players, across all three formats of the sport. Together with upping coaching facilities and the introduction of the Women’s Cricket Premier League in 2023, women’s cricket has slowly gained traction as a viable spectator sport. The knock-on effect can be seen in the record prize money of the $4.48 million that the International Cricket Council, the world’s governing body, has paid as prize money for the winners of this tournament.

 

The euphoria over a famous victory should not detract from the fact that the women’s cricket has a long distance to travel to catch up with the men’s game. The disparity in annual contracts is a case in point. For top-level male cricketers, annual contracts, which are in the nature of retainer fee, can be as much as ₹7 crore; for women, the equivalent fee is ₹50 lakh. This is less the result of deliberate discrimination and is more due to the fact that men play more tournaments and attract audiences almost double the size of those for the women’s game.

 

In the context of global sport in general, this disparity is not an exception. Whether football, hockey, tennis, basketball, or even chess, women remain under-paid compared to men principally because they play fewer tournaments and matches. Although Grand Slam tennis tournaments pay equal prize money to men and women — a source of perennial dispute since women play three-set matches — the disparity remains wide in other tournaments. The exceptions are badminton, where some female players can out-earn their male counterparts, and table tennis, which enforces pay parity at every level. The problem is less of audience interest — since most of these sports are no less watchable whatever the gender of the participants — than the preferences of broadcasters and sponsors, who privilege men’s tournaments over women’s (with the exception of tennis and badminton) on the assumption that sport is a “guy thing”. They only have to look at stadium audiences nowadays to realise how wrong they are.