Multi-million dollar WPL auction signals huge step forward for women’s sport | Australia sport

It was only a few days ago that members of the Australian women’s cricket team were contemplating how best to navigate the impending “distraction” of the inaugural Women’s Premier League auction, scheduled during the first week of the T20 World Cup. “It’s a little bit awkward,” captain Meg Lanning said in South Africa last week. “But it’s just trying to embrace that and understanding it’s actually a really exciting time and you actually don’t have a lot of control over most of it, so you’ve just got to wait and see.”

What a pleasant distraction it turned out to be. Lanning herself will be $192,000 richer for three weeks’ work with the Delhi Capitals. Her teammate, Ash Gardner, will earn three times that playing for the Gujarat Giants. The allrounder’s figure of $558,000 is more than Sam Kerr pockets in a season with Chelsea and more than the WNBA’s top earner, Jackie Young.

If that sounds like a watershed moment, it’s perhaps because it is. And it is not the only one this past week. The NRLW made its own wage-related headlines on Tuesday, to the effect that the next (agreed in principle) collective bargaining agreement will bring with it a $1.5m salary cap in 2027, at an average salary of $62,500. Women’s rugby, too, is making moves, with news on the weekend that Rugby Australia will begin contracting the Wallaroos.

In other words, things are happening in women’s sport. That is a sentence used quite a few times before. Like when 86,174 packed into the MCG for the 2020 Women’s T20 World Cup final, or in 2017 when people were still queueing at half-time to get into an already-full Princes Park to watch the inaugural AFLW match, or last November when the Women’s Rugby World Cup in New Zealand broke all-time attendance records.

The key difference here might be that these latest developments are of the cold, hard cash variety. The athletes themselves will see this kind of progress in their bank accounts, in part because of the other kinds that came before. When the US women’s football team won the World Cup in 2019 and generated more revenue than the US men’s team who earned four times what they did, they filed a wage discrimination act against US Soccer and won. The hugely popular Matildas also fought for equal pay and an improvement on other benefits and succeeded. Last year AFLW players were given a 94% pay rise.

Gardner’s epic payday – she attracted the joint second-highest bid – is commensurate with her achievements and standing in world cricket. The Belinda Clark medallist was an inclusion in the official ICC T20 team of 2022 and became the third player in women’s T20s to score more than 200 runs in a calendar year while averaging 50-plus and striking at a rate of 150 or more.

Beth Mooney and Tahlia McGrath, who were snapped up by Gujarat and UP Warriorz for $350,000 and $245,000 respectively, were also named in the women’s ICC T20 team. Australia’s women as a collective, who won Commonwealth Games gold last year, are well and truly out-performing the men, who are currently enduring an assault to their senses in India. Of the 30 overseas spots available in the first WPL auction, 14 were taken by Australians for a total of $2.48m.

The national team coach, Shelley Nitschke, believes the WPL can enhance the professionalism of the women’s game. “It takes the whole game forward, and we’re just a small part of that,” Nitschke said on Tuesday. “But it’s going to be really exciting to see all the players back playing in India together in another franchise, and [the] WPL is going to take the game to a different level, I think. So it’s exciting for Australian cricket as it is for cricket all over the world. I think our girls are excited about it, but focused on the job at hand while we’re here in South Africa as well.”

The caveat, of course, is that there is still some way to go before female players are being bought for $3.15m like Cameron Green was by the Mumbai Indians in December. Rugby Australia’s $2m funding upgrade for the women’s grade is still only part-time and across the sporting landscape there remain gender disparities in pay, facilities and working conditions and a comparative paucity in media coverage. Some sports have been blighted by allegations of abuse.

Despite all of it, the growth of women’s sport is undeniable. Forbes’ world’s highest-paid female athletes list is still dominated by tennis players but in 2022 eight of the top 10 made at least $10m – double the number from the year before and the first time more than seven women have hit that mark since the rankings were introduced in 2008. There are also more athletes from smaller sports, including freestyle skier Eileen Gu and Simone Biles, who in 2021 became the first gymnast to make the list in more than a decade and is still there.

Granted, none on the 2022 list – totalling a record $194m – come from team sports, in contrast to the men’s $992m equivalent 2022 top-10 list, which features eight across the inflated football, basketball and American football markets. But considering that, in the WBBL’s foundation season of 2015, player retainers topped out at $10,000 a campaign, the fact Gardner will make that much in a couple of WPL overs is something to celebrate.