Salary injustice in sports

Since the moment we are born, we are recognized as either males or females, or in some other cases, the third gender, but let’s focus on the masculine and feminine part of it now.

Right from the day, our cognitive abilities begin to process, we are conditioned in such a way that we are almost forced to believe that boys and girls are different, in every aspect. The ideal conditioning should have been that all of us are humans, and a biological difference conjures up terms like boys and girls. In practice, such a type of conditioning seems far from real, and we can only hope, that someday, this ideality will be practicality.

If we talk about the majority, most of the boys are handed bats and the girls are handed dolls. We do not know what is happening, and we just play with the toy we are given. A child is not allowed to choose his toy of preference, it's always the girls who get the dolls and the miniature kitchen sets while the boys get the bats and laptops. This is somewhere, creating a gender stereotype from such a young age, so much that kindergarten books have started to use it as a book question.

This image is snipped out from a primary school exercise book. Why set a particular notion about gender roles in those young minds?

It doesn’t stop here. Playing sports is a form of joy for some, some play it for time-pass, and for some their professional career is attached to it. Let’s consider cricket for this case.

Out of a country of 140 crore people, few lucky ones get a chance to represent it at the highest level. These players are playing the same sport, wearing the same jersey, sporting the same equipment, using the same cricket field, playing the same opposition, and are governed by the same cricket governing body, and the only difference lies in the gender of the players; men and women.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announces player contracts for each player for every annum.

The past year, BCCI invested a whopping 96 crore rupees for 28 cricketers while just 5.1 crore rupees for 22 of their feminine counterparts. Why such huge pay parity? The Grade A cricketers in the men list earn 7 crores a year while those who retain the Grade A spot in Women earn just 50 lakhs? BCCI says that the women don’t drive sponsorships and their matches earn less viewership whenever asked for justification. These statements totally oppose facts. The Women’s World Cup Final held in Australia gathered a record viewership of 86,174 people attending the MCG, the highest for any women’s fixture across the globe. This excuse of viewership also doesn’t hold its stand as BCCI never promotes Women’s cricket. Men have an IPL each year, and the women get to play an exhibition tourney of 6 matches. Where’s the equality?