The England football team’s progress through the World Cup is normally an engine of patriotic exuberance verging on hysteria. But only, it seems, when the players on the pitch are men. On Monday night, the women’s squad face Norway in their first game of the knockout stages of the tournament in Canada. In qualifying from the group stage, they have already surpassed the achievement of their male counterparts in Brazil last year, yet received a tiny fraction of the adulation for their efforts. This is not surprising – but it is disappointing.
Women’s sport in this country is routinely treated as a marginal pursuit for a niche audience. Around 90% of televised coverage of sport and 98% of newspaper coverage is men-only, according to the Women in Sport campaign group. The bias is simple to explain, less easily justified. The audience for men’s sport is sustained by a massive social and economic apparatus that isn’t reflected across the gender divide. Of all commercial sponsorship deals struck in UK sport, routinely less than 1% are for female athletes or teams. The imbalance generates all manner of specious defences for the status quo: that the men’s game is more exciting and more skilful; that it somehow represents an apogee of physical achievement unattainable by the ladies, and other such “weaker sex” cliches that belong to bygone centuries.
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