Mumbai Indians skipper Harmanpreet Kaur along with teammates celebrate with the Women’s Premier League 2023 trophy. (Source: ANI)
By Sharda Ugra
Not sure how many noticed, but in his introduction of the captains on the opening night of IPL 2023, Ravi Shastri called out Hardik Pandya’s name as, “captain of the Gujarat Giants.” Pandya is captain of a Gujarati team, defending IPL champions, Gujarat Titans. The Giants are another squad from Gujarat who just played in the Women’s Premier League (WPL). The same mistake is highly unlikely to happen again over the next two months, but the Giants owners can allow themselves a giggle.
Rarely is a women’s sports team top of mind over any men’s team, so the instant must be enjoyed. In a few months the WPL has set in motion the growth of a previously non-existent ecosystem around Indian women’s sport. Over the next few years, we will witness a surge in cricket’s ancillary industries which should feature more women in coaching, umpiring, scoring, training, data analytics, marketing and, the most-resisted, active administration.
The top women cricketers first received BCCI contracts only in 2015 and in October last year, the BCCI announced equal match fees for the men’s and women’s teams.
Until India made the 2017 ICC Women’s World Cup final in England, there was no clear contender for the country’s top women’s sports team. After WPL, there will be no doubt. Two factors are at work here: The first, the money available to women at the top and the second, that this money comes from franchises, outside of the board’s own financial structures.
With more playing spots available following an increase in, hopefully, the number of WPL teams, it is only fair to imagine that the first choice of sport for the country’s best female athletes could shift to cricket.
Missing: Match fees
There are still many ructions on in world sport about pay parity – equal match fees or prize money between men and women. Only last May, US Soccer became the first national body in world football to announce equal match fees and bonuses for its men’s and women’s national teams.
In India, the idea of match fees plus structured bonuses does not exist even in cricket. What exists are ad-hoc announcement of match fee increases and grand largesse cash thrown around following any success.
But Indian athletes from other team sport will laugh at such complaining because they get no match fees any way. Volleyball teams in the past have paid for their own tickets to international events. In a 2005 interview, KPS Gill, head of Indian hockey had said, “I don’t want to give match fees because I think it is wrong concept… It is bribery in another way… it is cent percent bribery. But we do pay the players, we help them find jobs.”
There are very few exceptions. While in camp, Rugby India pays its players a daily stipend, apart from taking care of meals and kit expenses, ensuring that the players leave a camp with money in hand. The practice is not commonly followed or and is not available to most other athletes, like hockey players for example.
The money trickles in
(Image source: insidesport.in)
In August 2021, the Odisha government increased its five-year Rs 50 crore sponsorship for Hockey India by another five years. The maths against regular structured match fees is just not adding up. Last November, Hockey India announced that players would receive cash incentives for winning: Rs 50,000 each to every player and Rs 25,000 for support staff for each win. It is still not a match fee.
In December, the All India Football Federation (AIFF) said that they would introduce match fees for the first time for the men’s and women’s teams, dependant on the AIFF increasing its financial resources.
While football clubs pay its players wages to sustain them, hockey players and athletes from other sport play and earn income from their employers, usually public sector companies. The creation of a professional club or league structure, which is largely ignored by most Indian sports bodies, will to a degree free the athletes’ economic dependence on the state or sports federations.
Why, even the world’s biggest cricket league is still not professional enough to give its homegrown male cricketers the freedom to play for other clubs in overseas leagues. Until the creation of the WPL our women cricketers have played in Australian and English leagues. But the arrival of the WPL’s big money, those doors are likely to close. What the well-paid men can’t do, why should the well-paid women be ‘allowed’ to?
In numbers
A measly 1% is the increase of women’s participation in male-dominated mostly manual blue and grey-collar jobs in the past six years from 11.96% in 2017 to 13.2% in December 2022.
Source: BetterPlace analysis for The Economic Times.
Going places
Women athletes in India continue to bring glory with Nitu Ghanghas, Lovlina Borgohain, Saweety Boora, and Nikhat Zareen picking up four golds in the just concluded Delhi World Championships.
Behind the sweet smell of success lies a story of grit and overcoming challenge. Nitu’s father who works as a bill messenger in the Haryana state secretariat had to borrow money from neighbours and take leave without pay to fund her training. Her mother sold her few gold ornaments. Nikhat continued to box despite her parent’s concern that nobody would marry her if something happened to her. Saweety and her family had to brave the taunts and even the threat of social boycott from their relatives and neighbours. And Lovlina finally overcame a psychological barrier by upgrading three previous bronze medals finally with a gold.
Tribute
(Image credits: Mother’s Dream Quilt Project)
As a reaction to the unabated gun violence in America, a group, Moms Demand Action has a “dream quilt project” with each quilt containing at least one block of fabric from a victim of survivor of gun violence. The quilts symbolise the human toll of gun violence in America.
The project tragically remains relevant as three nine-year-old students and three staff members died after the latest shooting at a private Christian grade school in Nashville, Tennessee.
The suspected shooter, 28-year-old Audrey Hale was also killed after a face-off with the police.
News you may have missed
Kalakshetra Foundation’s #MeToo
(Image source: thenewsminute.com)
MeToo allegations continue to roil the prestigious Rukmini Devi College for Fine Arts at the Kalakshetra Foundation, Chennai where students are protesting against four teachers accused of sexually harassing students.
[The News Minute has been tracking this story. See here]
Following the protests, the Kalakshetra administration decided to shut the college and postpone exams. Students in hostels have been asked to vacate their rooms but at the time of writing have refused to leave the campus.
NDTV reports that as many as 90 complaints of sexual abuse and harassment of male as well as female students have been received by the Tamil Nadu State Commission for Women.
Why do men think women college fests are a free pass to them?
A day after a group of men barged into Delhi University’s Indraprastha College for Women by scaling its boundary wells and harassing students during the college’s annual festival, students protested on campus even as the Delhi Police were yet to make arrests despite detaining 11 suspects. Meanwhile, the protesting students were bundled in a police van and removed from the spot since they did not have the permission of the police to protest.
In October last year, male students had scaled the wall and gone on a rampage during the Miranda House Diwali festival. Back then too, Delhi police first said it had received no official complaint, and registered a case against unnamed people after a video of the incident went viral.
…And the good news
Over 4,000 women, 4,314 to be precise, have applied to go on the Haj pilgrimage without a ‘mehram’ or male guardian. In October last year, Saudi Arabia had announced that a male blood relative with whom marriage is not permissible (a mehram) is no longer required to accompany a woman pilgrim from any part of the world.
Field notes
Unequal scales of law for women
The global pace of reforms towards equal treatment of women under the law has slumped to a 20-year low, finds a new World Bank report.
Over the past year, the global average score on the bank’s Women, Business and the Law report rose just half a point to 77.1. What this means is that women have just over 77% of the legal rights that men have. In India, that figure is even lower at 74.4%.
“Denying equal rights to women across much of the world is not just unfair to women; it is a barrier to countries’ ability to promote green, resilient, and inclusive development,” World Bank chief economist Indermit Gill said.
Just 14 countries, all of them high-income economies, have laws that give women the same rights as men. Nearly 2.4 billion women of working age still do not have the same legal rights as men.
In 2022, only 34 gender-related legal reforms such as increasing paid leave for parents and fathers, removing restrictions to women’s work and mandating equal pay were recorded across 18 countries, the lowest since 2001.
Read the report here.
Can’t make this up
(Image source: AP)
A sixth grade art lesson at a private school in Florida that showed students Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece, David caused such a furore over “pornography” that the principal was forced to resign by the school’s board.
Now, the museum in Florence that houses the David statue has invited parents and students from the Tallahassee Classical School to come and visit and see for themselves. Florence mayor Dario Nardella also tweeted an invitation to the sacked principal to visit so he could personally honour her. Confusing art with pornography is “ridiculous” Nardella said.
Incidentally, Florida is also mulling over a bill that will bar sex education, including information on periods, to students before the sixth grade.
The long(ish) read
It’s an old story of borders, immigration control and transnational legal systems that leaves hundreds of thousands of wives who marry men in other countries abandoned. Mahima Jain in Missing Perspectives has the story.
Do read it here.
AROUND THE WORLD
In the US, spouses of H-1B visa holders can work in the country, a judge ruled on Wednesday. The ruling comes as a relief to foreign workers in the tech sector that has seen recent retrenchments.
Matiullah Wesa, head of Pen Path, teaching girls in Afghanistan. (Image source: Pen Path/PA)
In Kabul, Matiullah Wesa, the founder of Pen Path and a prominent Afghan campaigner for female education has been arrested, reports Arab News. Wesa’s campaign picked up momentum last year when the Taliban banned girls from attending secondary school.
In Chiba, 30 miles outside Tokyo, Naoki Iwabuchi works out of a nondescript office to conduct his business of “yonigeya” or night moving which involves helping people disappear – for a fee of course. While some to choose to vanish because of debt, many others do so to escape domestic violence or stalking. In 2021, about 80,000 people were reported missing, according to a documentary on Iwabuchi’s business by the South China Morning Post, reported in The Insider.
Before I go, nominations for the Kamla Bhasin award for driving gender equality across South Asia are open until June 7. There are two awards of Rs 100,000 each, one for a woman (cis/trans) practitioner of a non-traditional livelihood and the other for a male (cis/trans) person who has worked towards enabling a gender-just ecosystem. Details here.
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| That’s it for this week. Do you have a tip or information on gender-related developments that you’d like to share? Write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com. Produced by Sukoon Wadhawan sukoon.wadhawan@partner.htdigital.in. |