SYDNEY, March 8 (Xinhua) -- The quest for gender equality in Australian sport has come a long way, but there is still much to be done, a cultural sports sociologist claims.
Coinciding with International Women's Day, the documentary Girls Can't Surf, which was released last year, will be staged at Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach this week, to emphasize the empowerment of female athletes.
The documentary showed how female surfing greats seek to break stereotypes, with each woman fighting against the odds to make their dreams of competing a reality.
"In the past, women in sport were not treated as respectfully or as valuable as men in sport in Australia," said Adele Pavlidis, a cultural sports sociologist from Griffith University.
Speaking to Xinhua, Pavlidis noted the implausibility of champion racehorse Black Caviar being named Australian sportswoman of the year by the Daily Telegraph in 2012.
"We had Sally Pearson who won gold at the Olympics that year, there were lots of other options, but they chose the horse. They would never do that for men," she said.
Australia's Workplace Gender Equality (WGEA), a government statutory agency, cited data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showing the median full-time annual income for male athletes is 67,652 Australian dollars (50,000 U.S. dollars), while female athletes earn only 42,900 Australian dollars (31,000 U.S. dollars).
Furthermore, in the FIFA Women's World Cup, Australia's national team would only take home 4 million Australian dollars (2.91 million U.S. dollars) in prize money for winning the entire tournament.
That figure is just half of what the men's national team would earn for simply qualifying to play in the FIFA World Cup, according to WGEA.
Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, Pavlidis claimed more women lost jobs in the sports sector. "It was interesting to see the pandemic wasn't equal for everyone," she said.
A report by Cricket Australia showed that representation at executive management levels slipped from 34 percent in 2018-19 to 31 percent in 2020-21, noting the impact of the pandemic on the workforce.
Addressing the decline, the report states "the acceleration of gender diversity in the workforce continues to be a focus area for improvement, particularly for executive management and developing our future leaders."
However, there have been areas of improvement in recent years. Strath Gordon, head of Public Affairs from the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC), told Xinhua that the proportion of female athletes in recent Australian Olympic Teams showed signs of outshining their male counterparts, with more women competing in male-dominated sports.
In the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics that ended last month, 23 of Australia's 44 athletes were women, a record high female representation in Australian Winter Olympic history.
However, some believe more should be done.
In July 2021, the Champions of Change Coalition released the 2019-20 Progress Report on the Pathway to Gender Equality in Sport. It looked at a group of Australia's sporting organizations across the nation and brought together leaders across the sports sector to monitor and report.
"The overall pace of change is slow across the industry and there is some way to go to achieve gender equality, particularly in terms of women in leadership and progress towards pay equality for elite women athletes," said the Coalition in a statement.
"It is time to acknowledge how uneven Australian sporting fields can be," Pavlidis said.
To improve gender equality in sporting fields, Pavlidis hoped she could see more women in leadership and coaching positions, in addition to athletes. ■