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At a glance, women’s sport seems to be accelerating towards equal pay at a quicker rate than ever before. A 2021 report by the BBC found that 90% of sports now offer equal prize money at their major championships,  and packed out stadiums for women’s matches in major sports like football, tennis and cricket have become commonplace. But it’s not as simple as that.

“Sport does rank rather badly against all sorts of other sectors when it comes to equal pay and conditions,” Lombe Mwambwa, the interim CEO of the Global Observatory for Gender Equality and Sport, told DW.

Though little sport-specific data exists, the consensus is that elite female footballers earn 15-25% of their male equivalents. While there are exceptions like tennis, which is moving towards equal prize money for men and women at all tournaments, the gaps are significant across the top end of most sports.

There are almost as many reasons for that as there are sports: the historical banning of women’s sports in many countries, a lack of willingness to invest in them, a lack of professional pathways and maternity provisions and, perhaps most enduringly, the perception that sport is for men and there is only a commercial appetite for men’s sports.

Alex Culvin, a former footballer who now works for global players union FIFPRO, said comparing the salaries of the top earners in the sport does the equal pay argument a disservice — it only looks at a tiny, distorted fragment of the picture.

Salary floors and grassroots changes

“I think the men’s top 5% earners really inflate the market. If you’re a lower league player, you’re not earning that €400,000 ($470,000) a week, you’re probably earning €4,000 a week. And some women’s players are on that.”

Culvin advocates for so-called salary floors in the women’s game and a more organic approach to growth. These collective agreements, which are in place in the top leagues in the USA, UK and Spain, operate similarly to a minimum wage while female footballers successfully battled to win limited maternity rights in 2024.

“I think the smart business thing to do is invest in your women’s team, provide environments in which they can thrive. Revenues will come into the game, and salaries will increase as a consequence,” Culvin added.

For Mwambwa, simply equalizing pay instantly across all athletes is not realistic. Instead, she wants to see changes at the grassroots, and not just on the pitch.

“We know women comprise a large part of the sports workforce that is voluntary, underpaid or not recognized as work. In many cases, for a long time, women have even worked as coaches and referees and all these other roles but have had lack of opportunities to progress due to various barriers like costs or lack of courses.

“If we are to think about in sport, we need to think broader than just the paycheck.”

Conditions matter too

At the top level, conditions are often significantly worse for women, even where prize or appearance money is equal.

“There are federations who do window dressing to say they’re an equal employer,” Culvin said, referring to national teams who have equalized match fees in recent years.

“But everything else is unequal — how they travel to games, the facilities or level of chef that they have and that kind of thing. All of the factors that enable players to perform are so disparate and unequal that really the match fee almost becomes irrelevant.”

Jasmina Covic, one of a small number of female football agents told DW that while clubs at the top of football are investing in their women’s team, it is not a universal policy.

“There are clubs who have big difficulties with it, and who say ‘No, the men’s team always have priority. If they don’t need to use the pitch, then the women’s team can use it.”

But a more existential threat to women’s sport comes from the lurch of many countries, particularly the USA, to the political right. The introduction of legislation known as Title IX in 1972, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in any government-funded education setting, led to a surge in female participation. That is widely accepted to have contributed to the US’ pre-eminence in both the women’s football World Cup and the Olympics, the two largest sporting events in the world. 

Political picture gloomy

Days after returning to office, US President Donald Trump made changes to the law, which has numerous strands, banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s events. Some see this as the first signs of a creep towards diminishing women’s sports under the banner of his dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies.

“The Trump administration’s broader assault on what it refers to as DEI – efforts to redress inequities based on historical and current forms of racism and other forms of discrimination – is having a deeply chilling impact. Even the word gender seems to be an anathema to the US government, with, for example, the US mission to the UN (United Nations) seeking to remove this word from every UN resolution,” wrote Heather Barr, the Associate Director, Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, earlier this year.

“What happens in schools is bound to affect sport, because lots of people start out sports engagement in the school system or connected to the school system,” added Mwambwa. “So if we are seeing changes influenced from right wing or right wing leaning politics that do not value the idea of equality, then that’s going to really have a big impact on sport.”

Big events in big stadiums and the grand gestures from grand organizations undoubtedly have an impact — both on those playing and the next generation. But on International Equal Pay Day, it seems clear that sport must make greater efforts to address structural and historic inequalities in both pay and conditions as well as navigate global and local politics if it wants to move closer to parity.

Edited by: Chuck Penfold