There is an excellent essay by Radhika Vaz on Scoop Whoop titled ‘Why The Campaign To Have Mothers’ Names On Cricketers’ Jerseys Is Vomit-Inducing For Feminists’, and I urge you to read it. I agree with almost all of it. There’s just one bit I have a small quibble with. This is when she writes:
I don’t want token gestures and tearjerkers. I want the real deal – I want women in cricket to be paid as much as the men, to be trained as well as them and to be treated like the champions they are.
This is a good time to ask the question: Where does the money in cricket come from? The BCCI is not a benevolent godlike entity having a supply of money that comes from heaven. Instead, their money comes from viewers like you or me, who spend our time watching the game. (That time carries an opportunity cost, needless to say.) That time is then turned into money by the BCCI, which has sold those telecast rights to a channel who then sell advertising space to brands that are paying for our attention. So there are conduits in the way, but how much money goes into the game is a direct function of how many people watch the game. The BCCI’s coffers are filled by us. Our time is their money.
Now, the brutal fact is that most of us choose to watch men’s cricket much more than women’s cricket. (We might make this choice for a variety of reasons, including sexist ones, but those are not germane here.) So most of the money that the BCCI has is because people watch men’s cricket, and it’s only fair that if I create value for the BCCI by watching the Indian men’s team, that money should go to the men’s team and not to the women’s team, who I chose not to watch. To take it from the men and give it to the women would, in fact, be condescending and patronising, and any feminist should be against such handouts. I’d imagine the appropriate feminist response to be, “We’ll earn our own way, thank you, we don’t want your bloody handouts.”
Interestingly, the BCCI does already subsidise other parts of the game somewhat for its longer-term health. While the international men’s team gets all the eyeballs (and thus draws all the money), the BCCI pumps a large part of that money into domestic cricket, in nurturing a feeder system for the game. It almost certainly spends more on women’s cricket than women’s cricket brings in, and I think that’s great for the ecosystem and no one should grudge them that. However, to say that it is the right of women cricketers to be paid as much as male cricketers is a step too far. They simply don’t create as much value in monetary terms, and any demand for equal monetary compensation is thus unfair.
The counterpoint to this would be tennis, which, if I am not mistaken, pays men and women equally despite men bringing in more eyeballs (and thus money). I don’t object to that, just as I don’t object to the BCCI’s policies. They can do what they want, and if we disagree, we can take our eyeballs elsewhere. Sadly, most people in India, including women, will continue to watch cricket; and when they do, men’s cricket far more frequently than women’s cricket. I’m assuming Vaz watches at least as much women’s cricket as men’s cricket, but most of us don’t, and its the choices we make that determine how they get paid.
This is a minor quibble, and it’s possible that I misinterpreted this part of Vaz’s fine piece, and she wan’t really blaming the BCCI for the disparity in pay. It is also a fact that women are usually discriminated against in the workplace, and that reflects in their pay, which is unequal everywhere. Still, I hear people make this complaint in the context of sport, where it really doesn’t hold water—thus this post.
PS. I started writing about cricket a decade-and-a-half ago, and this is probably the first post where I’ve mentioned the BCCI in a non-negative way. I’m buying myself a cookie for that.