Clarity on pay parity

From economic, social and philosophical perspectives, gender pay parity in cricket is a most welcome development. The impulse towards gender equality, it can be argued, is one of the finer achievements of the human mind, its chains broken by the spirit of humanism.

The biases against women have been immense, cemented by social norms and propped up by religion and scripture. Aristotle may have been a top-class brain in his time, but a modern school student — especially in a country, say, in northern Europe — would have more enlightened views on gender equality or human rights. “The male, unless constituted in some respect contrary to nature, is by nature more expert at leading than the female, and the elder and complete than the younger and incomplete,” he wrote in Politics. Elsewhere in Politics, more of the same: “The relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled.”

Aristotle’s views on women seem extremely dated — which is just right, for he lived some 2,700 years ago. Aristotle was no fool, he only described women as he saw them around him. But he could not emancipate himself from the prejudice against women — which, remarkably, his teacher, Plato, was able to do to a certain extent.

The effects of centuries of bias are now plain to see to any right-thinking individual — they are an affront to human dignity, detrimental to the wellbeing of society.

In sport, women have been traditionally short-changed — lack of promotion, lack of adequate media coverage and, thus, lack of revenue. In general, women don’t get to play enough at the best arenas — the English women’s cricket team is yet to play a Test match at the ‘home’ of cricket, the Lord’s ground in London. It was only as recently as 1999 that the MCC admitted women members. In golf, the revered Augusta National, the venue of the Masters, first admitted women members only in 2012. Among golf’s four Majors, the Masters is the only one to not have a women’s tournament.

In tennis, the US Open made the landmark decision of equal pay for men and women in 1973. Australian Open paid women and men the same prize money in the 1980s and early 1990s before, surprisingly, lapsing into inequality; gender pay parity in the first Grand Slam event of the year was finally established in 2001. It was six years later that Wimbledon and French Open started paying women players the same as men, 34 long years after the US Open.

The Indian cricket board (BCCI) did not exactly embrace the women’s game with great enthusiasm — it was the last of the big international cricket boards to do so, that too on the directives of the International Cricket Council (ICC), in 2006. The profile of women’s cricket, and support for it in India, grew dramatically after that. Last year, the BCCI increased the women’s cricketers’ match fees to the level of the male players — Rs 15 lakh for a Test, Rs 6 lakh for an ODI and Rs 3 lakh for a T20 International.

The catch is that women’s annual contracts are worth a fraction of the men’s — India’s best female cricketers are awarded Grade A contracts, worth Rs 50 lakh; the best male cricketers, placed in Grade A+, are assured of Rs 7 crore. Not much parity there. There’s more: women get to play much fewer Tests or ODIs — Harmanpreet Kaur has played only three Test matches since making her international debut in 2009, for instance. Compare that with 66 Tests and 174 ODIs that Ravindra Jadeja has played since debuting the same year. Gender pay parity in Indian cricket, thus, is not quite what the headlines suggest it is.

At the international level, the decision of the ICC to award equal prize money in its tournaments — such as the 50-over World Cup, the T20 World Cup and the Under-19 World Cup — is very good news.

There exist old-fashioned curmudgeons who pipe in with the argument that women’s sport must match the revenues from men’s sport before pay parity is implemented. They believe women sportspersons are taking a disproportionate share from the revenue the men bring. For instance, Raymond Moore, a former player who was the CEO of the Indian Wells Masters, said in 2016: “If I was a lady player, I’d go down every night on my knees and thank God that Federer and Nadal were born, because they have carried this sport.”

Moore, much younger than Aristotle, is, however, a similar relic of the past. He views sport as a purely economic exercise. This, however, is a short-sighted view. It’s not a zero-sum game — Virat Kohli won’t become poor if Smriti Mandhana is paid the same as him. Reducing the lofty ideal of the equality of human beings to revenue-sharing is petty. The benefits of pay parity would be beneficial to societies across the world — attracting more women into sports, leading to healthier populations.

Look around, observe people and their activities — you won’t be blamed if you reach the conclusion that human beings are primarily focussed on improving their standard of living by making money. Women must have equal opportunities in this.

India ranked a poor 127th in the Global Gender Gap Report 2023. India, it said, had reached only 36.7 per cent parity on economic participation and opportunity. Globally, at the current rate, the gap will be closed in 131 years. That would be too slow and too late for, perhaps, billions of people.