The QUT Classic is so fancy a race you can order a logo T-shirt to run in. If you want to race the 10kms, whether you’re a woman or a man, it costs you $40. Sure, it’s a fun run, but it’s more than a few laps around the oval. According to their website, in 2016 over three thousand people ran the race.
It’s not surprising that runner Alexandra Blake thought, lining up at the start line, it was like every other running race from the Olympics to the City to Surf – that there would be prize for the first three men over the line, and the first three women.
There wasn’t. The race director allegedly told her the prizes were for the first three people over the line, and because she wasn’t one of them, she didn’t get a prize.
Blake spoke up. She posted about it on Facebook and the media seized upon it. By mid-morning on the Monday after the race, QUT had awarded prize money to the women.
Once you see inequality in women’s sport, you can’t unsee it and you see it everywhere. And, history tells us, this inequality is only going to change because women see it and call it out. Only then, does women’s sport edge closer to being equal.
Tiger Woods won $2,070,000 when he took out 2019’s PGA Masters. Ko Jin-young, the No 1 woman golfer in the world has won a little over $1m… over the eight events she has played this season.
The vast majority of change for women in sport has only happened because women have spoken up, or protested – bringing attention to the issue and embarrassing sports administrators into doing something.
One of the most extraordinary, brave moments of this direct action came in 1967 at the Boston Marathon, the world’s most prestigious marathon (arguably even more so than the Olympics, for the running community). Fed up with being excluded from marathon running, 20-year-old journalism student Kathrine Switzer registered in a neutral name and began to run the race. Famously, when it was discovered she was a woman, men tried to pull off her race number and get her out of the race. It took another five years for women to be included in the Boston Marathon, but those violent photos have been associated with this conversation ever since.
It comes at a cost for women, the speaking out and up – as it does in every other aspect of life.
In 2018, I had a tiny taste of this. I was skulking about the website of my hometown’s agricultural show, thinking about running in the district-famous novelty potato race. I was shocked to find the men’s race got a first prize of $1,000 and prize money up to 10th place, while the women got $200 and prize money up to third place.
After discussing it with a few friends, I decided to fundraise the rest of the money on my Facebook page. I set up a Go Fund Me, and off we went. Naively, I thought it would be pretty straight forward: we’d raise the money and awareness, and prize money would be forever equal.
Instead, I was trolled online fairly savagely from people as local as Hoddle Street, Robertson, and people as far away as the USA and UK. My mother called me crying, begging me to stop, because she was spending all day arguing in her small local grocery store about it. On the day of the show, I was shunned by some people I’ve known and been friendly with my whole life. The local show society (run mainly by women) felt I’d attacked them and hardly communicated with me – the day of the race, I had to wait by the oval gate to make sure the winners had the fundraised money in their packets. It was an incredibly humiliating time.
Even though I know it was the right thing to do (and I’ve since written a play inspired by the events), I still feel a bit embarrassed about the “fuss” I caused. Yet, in 2019, the race was run with completely equal prize money.
After the potato race, a well known feminist told me she didn’t contribute to the fundraising or awareness because she was sick of contributing financially to women’s inequality. That men and organisations should split their prize money with the women, and if they don’t, we women should start our own events.
Leaving aside that’s asking sportswomen to silo themselves from their training communities, we don’t live in a world where the vast majority of men are used to sharing their spoils with women. We need to demand more from sports administrators at the sponsorship level.
This means making a fuss. Looking for inequality and bringing it to the attention of social media networks, your friends, the media and ultimately the administrators who need to make change.
It’s the only way we’ll move towards cultural and financial equality for women in sport.
