Why Are Female Athletes Paid Differently To Male Ones?

An honest investigation.

I care a lot about equality. 

I recently saw news about Matilda’s (Australia’s Women’s Football Team) fighting for higher pay, particularly by pointing out that the prize pool available in the Women’s World Cup is much lower than that available in the Men’s World Cup.

That seems seems very unfair on the surface. Somebody’s gender should not affect how much they get paid!

So I was a little mad, but then I thought for a second, if somebody’s gender should not affect how much they get paid, why do men and women play in different divisions?

Well, it turns out the Men’s World Cup isn’t actually the Men’s World Cup. It’s just the World Cup. Anybody can compete in it if they are selected and put forward by their country (although some *countries* do discriminate on gender in this selection process).

The World Cup doesn’t discriminate on gender, but the Women’s World Cup does. You’re not allowed to play in it if you are male.

So, male players are discriminated against by the World Cup here, and female players aren’t, at least on the surface. At a given level of ability, female players get paid far more, get more attention and media, and get to compete in more high status tournaments than male players.

So does the World Cup discriminate against men? Or against women? Both? Neither? There’s more to think through here.

Female players are actually just a lot worse than male players. They are so much worse that female national teams regularly lose to male under 15s teams.

But they are worse players *because* of their gender -- or rather, because of their physical sex. Female athletes are smaller, weaker, and slower than their male counterparts in the vast majority of sports -- for such an effect to appear across all countries, most sports, and in most of history -- it’s probably mostly biological, rather than social. (Sanity check on that — you can also just see that women are almost always smaller and weaker than men by looking).

So, if somebody is born into a body that isn’t as well optimised for a sport as another person’s body, should they be allowed to create a competition where people with bodies similar to theirs can compete (and people lucky enough to have more suitable biology are barred from competing)? Is that discrimination?

Well, yes, it’s discrimination, but it’s probably a fine and okay type of discrimination? So much so the word ‘discrimination’ seems too harsh. We allow 4 year olds to play against other 4 year olds because they get something out of it that they wouldn’t get if we insisted that all leagues be open to everybody (and thus forced them to play against 21 year olds in the name of equality).

We also have closed, exclusive leagues that only allow elderly people, or people of different weights (in sports like weightlifting and boxing), or people with disabilities (like in the paralympics and special olympics).

When there’s such a major physical difference between groups, I can see the rationale for drawing a line and saying “only people of this body type can compete in this league”, as long as you *also* have an open league where anybody can compete if they wish.

But we shouldn’t be surprised if more people enjoy watching the open league, and more money is available for the open league, than for the many leagues that are built on deliberately excluding the most capable people.

But why not just have leagues based on performance? Why have a women’s league, instead of an Open League Division 7, where some of the most skilled women would be able to compete against middling-skilled men and win about half the time?

I thought about this, and I think it just changes the sport. Like, that’s fine, go create an open league with many divisions like that, but the behaviour of the players in the sport will be different in such a league vs a closed-exclusive league. 

If you have peak-woman vs middling-man winning about half the time each, the woman would likely be *much* more technically skilled than the man, and the man would be much more powerful. Even if they win half the time each, I can see why each of them might prefer to play against someone of *the same* technical skill level (and why, in some sports, it might just straight up be unacceptably dangerous for the woman).

It becomes more obvious in sports like basketball. Say you had somebody who was 7ft tall playing against someone who was 5ft tall, and you adjusted their skills so that each had a 50% chance of winning. The game becomes simplified -- the 7ft person would practically *always* catch the ball when it’s high in the air, and practically *always* have a clear shot whenever they wanted to take it. Their odds of winning are largely just a function of how good (or bad) they are at aiming right.

Meanwhile, to have a 50% chance of winning, the 5ft player would necessarily be much quicker, and much more skilled with the ball. The 7ft player has no hope of stealing it from them, and just stands straight up and tries to hit it out of the air when they shoot. 

What a boring game that would be for the players! The whole game is simplified to the point of absurdity! It might be fun occasionally, but I wouldn’t blame either of them for preferring to play with people that are the same size and skill level.

Ironically, basketball is one sport that *doesn’t* seem to have height based leagues. I wonder why not?

The other interesting thing is we don’t actually care about capabilities in sport to the exclusion of all else. We don’t allow athletes to use performance enhancing drugs. We don’t allow them to use tools which could dramatically improve their success in getting a ball into the opposing net (such as a cannon), or for blocking the ball (such as a wall). 

The sports have a bunch of common-sense rules that try to encourage things other than just putting the ball into the net as fast as possible. They are trying to encourage health and fitness among players, social cohesion and entertainment among fans, ad sales and vague brand related optimisation, and probably a lot of other things. Normal sport, played among non-professionals, is mainly for fun, fitness, and socialisation, so it usually isn’t about *truly* maximising ability to hit the ball into the opposing net by using a cannon (or a male body).

It’s probably also worth making a note that all of this doesn’t mean there *isn’t* other social discrimination, such as being rejected from an open team *because* they assume you’re not capable enough because of your sex, which I’m sure happens sometimes. Some leagues are also male-only, not open, which is somewhat symbolic at the highest performance levels, but is still annoying and unfair.

I suppose the tldr is; sport is strange, they aren’t trying to optimise to win to the exclusion of all else, exclusive leagues seem morally okay most of the time, and it also seems okay for the open leagues to be more successful getting funding and attention. The system seems to be sorted out here reasonably fairly, in it’s own strange way.