Sponsors are not the only ones letting female athletes down

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/16/female-sport-australia-sponsorship-ellyse-perry

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Six months back, upon hearing the news that Australia's multi-sport superstar Ellyse Perry had been named among the 50 most marketable athletes in world, I had a bit of a whinge that the sponsorship dollars were hardly rolling in for Perry and fellow female athletes in Australia. <br />Both her and Sally Pearson had just been snubbed as Rebel Sport poster girls in favour of Michael Clarke's wife.

Now the Australian Sports Commission chairman, John Wylie, has taken a gentle swipe at the corporate world, criticising their failure to support Australia's female athletes during times that their male counterparts have so often floundered. "The message I would give to Australian companies and to broadcasters is that there is a massive opportunity in front of them that is under their noses that is underappreciated right now," Wylie said.

It raises the question of whether what we see on billboards, pop-ups, banner ads and during ad breaks gives us a true insight into the position of our sports stars in the cultural hierarchy. Are female stars still underrepresented to the ludicrous degree that they were in previous generations?

An underrated factor in this problem is the fragmentation of our media consumption. As traditional media channels such as print and free-to-air television have waned in popularity, the advertising industry has noted the way our eyeballs have drifted elsewhere. As our viewing, listening and web browsing habits have evolved, so too have the efforts of these brands to beam their messages at us. Advertising has become more targeted and specific. If I send an email to a friend about football or cricket, the evil genius of Google's algorithms will ensure I get related advertising messages flashed straight at me.

If you were to search for YouTube clips of Perry and her Southern Stars team-mates, tweet about the Matildas or Google the Australian Diamonds playing schedule, there's a fair chance you'd encounter related advertising messages. If people like Wylie or myself do not encounter any of these stars or the brands that they promote, it may not necessarily be because they're not represented in our evolving media channels.

Since I wrote about Perry it has come to my attention that she now benefits from sponsorship deals or brand ambassador roles with Adidas, Red Bull, Jockey, and Microsoft. She's also been snapped up for a commentary role with Fox Sports when her no doubt exhausting dual-sport playing schedule permits. She's not a Michael Jordan-level marketing juggernaut – and you're still far more likely to see male athletes on billboards than their female counterparts – but to say that Perry is going unnoticed is patronising and incorrect.

Likewise, five-time women's ASP surfing world champion Stephanie Gilmore has ridden her success. With Quiksilver and Ford among her major supporters, Gilmore has also starred in ads for Sanitarium Weet-Bix, though one leery commercial for Roxy hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Gilmore's rival Sally Fitzgibbons is hardly lingering in the shallow end either, boasting just as many corporate backers as her childhood friend Perry.

Wylie's criticisms of sports broadcasters are probably more valid than those leveled at the advertising world, but he should probably add the governing bodies of some of those sports into the mix. After all, they are the custodians of those games and it's their job to be selling themselves to the broadcasters. It's in this arena that women's sport genuinely struggles to gain traction. In so many prominent sports the ruling body's No1 priority is the men's team. This is true of cricket, soccer, basketball and countless other team sports.

Take Cricket Australia as an example. In general terms it could be praised for the work it is doing to raise the profile of the women's game, but a quick look at its website on Wednesday morning revealed the only sighting of a woman was a thumbnail link to an article by recently-retired player Lisa Sthalekar. That's actually pretty good by the CA website's standards; usually there's nothing unless you navigate your way through to the section dedicated to women's cricket. And TV coverage? Forget about it.

Australia's female cricketers are certainly winners on the field but aside from Perry, they are most definitely underdogs off it. It wasn't until the past 12 months that their employer finally saw fit to raise their wages to anything approaching the station of a professional athlete. It barely needs saying that the belated pay day is minuscule next to the wage bill of Australia's maligned men's team. Until recently women's state representatives actually had to pay to play, a genuinely depressing situation to ponder. They'll now earn anything up to $7,000 per year for their services, a bit less than David Warner might for a miscued first-ball heave.

This is but one example and CA is certainly not only offender: take a look at the Fifa website and see how many references to women's football you find on the homepage. If we're to consider the pay and benefits awarded to female players by bodies like CA as symbolic of the broader push to increase the profile of women's sport, maybe it's not just the sponsors we should be gunning for.

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