Season of Equality

There is one step the AFL should take right now to show respect for women. Let’s call it The Season of Equality. The women’s and men’s football seasons should be of equal length, with an equal amount of footy air-time. This means that the seasons should not overlap.

Three questions need to be answered if this is to happen. How early can the footy season start? How late can it end? And who will have the first half of the year, the men or the women?

These are tough questions, to be sure, but humans have dealt with worse. Perhaps the seasons could start in early February and end in mid-October. In 2025 this would allow for a 37-weeks of footy. If there are 19 women’s and men’s teams, then each team can play every team once and there can be four rounds of finals. The 18 home-and-away games would need to be squeezed into 15 weeks – an average of one game every six days. The Covid-affected season of 2020 was much more hectic than this. Games could be made a bit shorter if necessary, as they were in 2020.

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After the stunning birth of the AFLW in 2017, the AFL has restricted the women’s time in the spotlight. Their first seasons were very short, but they were completed before the men began. The women had their own time. This year the women will start in August. That’s right, just when the men’s finals are about to start, the women’s season will begin. How will this help the women’s league to get attention? Their season will then run into December – hardly traditional footy territory, to say nothing of the health risks of playing in the heat.

This year the AFL took a very disrespectful step by starting the men’s season two weeks earlier than usual. It will still end when it usually does, at the end of September. But after shuffling the women away from what had been their exclusive late-summer season, they then took some of that time for an even longer men’s season. The technical term for this is rubbing your face in it.

In the brilliant documentary, Girls Can’t Surf, champion surfers speak about their battles against exclusion and disrespect. It was normal for the men to surf at competitions when the waves were good. When the surf turned to rubbish they would send the women in. Then they would say, “girls can’t surf.” When Pauline Menczer became Champion of the World in 1993 there was no prize money and she was handed a broken trophy. The AFL has at least agreed to equal prize money for women footballers, but this is a tiny fraction of footballer’s incomes. As far as salaries are concerned, men will still be receiving six times what the women are on by the end of 2027. This is from a league where the television rights alone provide enough money to pay the men’s salaries twice over. This is before a sponsor is signed, a ticket sold or a membership is paid for. The AFL is awash with cash and it gives the women players loose change picked up from the floor.

Does this look like respect to you? 

Some people will sook about the men’s season being made shorter. They will echo Scott Morrison’s plea that, while women should have equality, it shouldn’t be at the expense of men. Sometimes that might be true. But at other times, men will lose when women get their fair share. Boo-hoo, that’s how it goes. When women were excluded from much of the workforce, for instance, that made it easier for men to get the good jobs. There was just less competition. Then the rules changed and men had to compete against competent women. Men were a bit worse off, in relative terms. But they survived.

In any case, men will win with Season Equality. For the first time in decades they will have a fair draw, with every team playing every other team once.

The footy season should be shared equally between women and men. What could be fairer than that? So, let’s get to work on these tough questions: When can the season start? When can it end? And who will go first?

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