International Women’s Day: The unequal playing field of women’s sport

India today is a superpower in the cricketing world and its lobbying at the International Olympic Committee played no small part in ensuring cricket is included at the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 2028. As host country for the Commonwealth Games in 2030, India also harbours ambitions of staging the Olympics—the ultimate sporting event. And yet, as the country–soon slated to become the fourth largest economy in the world–celebrates International Women’s Day today, its sportswomen continue to experience different realities depending on the sport they play.

The Indian women’s cricket and football teams are in Australia at the moment. The cricketers were in action on Friday when their one-off Test kicked off in Perth. The footballers are participating in the women’s Asian Football Confederation Asia Cup. While the women's cricketing team is among the best paid in the world, the reality of footballers, who fall under the purview of All India Football Federation (AIFF), is very different.

Most Indian women footballers have to work a job in order to pay their bills and continue playing. The Indian football governing body has made some missteps in recent times, the most recent one being at a continental footballing event — Asia’s equivalent of the Euros championship. AIFF shipped youth kits to the Indian women’s football team, which didn’t fit most of the team members. Because of this oversight, the team representing India on the international stage was forced to buy makeshift kits from a local store three days before they played their opening game against Vietnam. This would never have happened to any Indian cricket team.

The Indian women’s football team, evidently, has overcome several odds and beaten higher ranked teams like Thailand to qualify for the Asian Cup. They landed in Australia with a chance to become the first Indian football team to qualify for a Fifa World Cup. Despite the kit fiasco, the players put up a great fight against Vietnam losing 2-1 due to an unlucky injury time goal.

PLAYING AND WINNING IN ILL-FITTING SHOES

Across the world, most women footballers until recently were forced to play in youth kits and men’s or boys’ boots. While things have become much more professional in women’s football in developed countries with women playing in kits designed for women, it is worth noting that women players in most parts of the world, especially in the Global South, continue playing in poorly fitting kits. When it comes to boots, things even out (or get worse). Till as recently as 2023, 82% of female footballers in Europe reported discomfort owing to ill-fitting shoes. The boys’ shoes they wore were either too tight or too big. It has only been in the last four years or so that top sports brands such as Nike, Puma and Adidas have introduced boots designed specifically for women.

That women in professional sport continue to perform at high levels despite the odds stacked against them is a success story readily milked by branding, marketing and social media gurus. But they do this while ignoring a sizeable customer base of women who pursue sports recreationally or exercise regularly. This cohort continues to wear faulty and uncomfortable gear. While there are plenty of athleisure brands — both homegrown and international — ensuring comfortable and practical apparel for women, the omnipresent sports shoes they wear usually do not fit well.

Bengaluru-based marketing professional Tanuja Gajria, 44, plays badminton, padel and squash and goes to the gym. She can’t find a shoe that fits her properly. “I have large feet so I end up buying men’s shoes for badminton and padel, I need to put an insole in them to be able to play. My gym shoes are always loose around the heels,” she says. A lot of women runners also complain about their shoes being loose around their heels.

This is because a lot of brands continue to design shoes based on the male foot and then manufacture them in smaller sizes and feminine colours — a process called “shrink it and pink it” — to sell to women. Despite spending billions on successfully developing new shoes that improve performance and reduce injury risk, most of the design and testing has been carried out on men and boys, noted researchers in a paper published in the BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine journal.

WINNING FOR HALF-THE PRIZE MONEY

This partisan approach doesn’t stop at women's gear alone. As Shruthi Arun, a 44-year-old food entrepreneur from Bengaluru, found out, it also extends to competitions where women are offered lower prize money compared to men.

The season’s winner of the Devil’s Circuit, which has Maruti Suzuki as its title sponsor, gets a Swift car and ₹2 lakhs cash prize… when it’s a man. A woman who aces the same Devil’s Circuit season wins the same car but just half the cash amount of ₹1 lakh. It’s the same story for The Yoddha fitness race. The male open winner walks away with ₹10 lakhs while the female open winner is awarded only half the amount.

“I was livid. In this day and age when equal prize is the norm and equal pay is talked about, these competitions are not valuing the women who pay to participate. Why should women get a lesser prize?” she questions. The usual response from the organisers, whom Arun has contacted on LinkedIn, has been that the difference in prize money was simply a function of the number of participants they get in each of these categories. “More intense competition equals more prize money but they hope to have this balance corrected as the event grows and more women come to the sport”. Lower prize money is certainly a good way to attract more women, Arun sarcastically points out.

And for all those celebrating that ultimate symbol of progress in women sports — the sports bra, it will do them a lot of good to remember that it became a mass market product only in 1990. That was the year Nike invented the first compression sports bra, followed by the introduction of the racerback bra in 1991. Yes, one of the most routine accessories in an active woman’s life is a rather recent development.

Things have definitely improved for women since the 90s, and while each minor improvement needs to be celebrated, it's inarguable that there’s still a long way to go. Women’s sport is slated to become a multi-billion-dollar industry in the next five years, but if women are to truly reap the benefits of this progress, thoughtful investments must be made, pay must be equal, working conditions need to improve, and even their simplest needs must be met.

Shrenik Avlani is a writer and editor and the co-author of The Shivfit Way, a book on functional fitness.