The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket has blasted the ECB in a landmark report which brands cricket institutionally racist, sexist and classist.
Commission Chair Cindy Butts told the media, in a damning inversion of the ECB’s own promotional slogan:
“The stark reality is cricket is not a game for everyone.”
Specifically on women’s cricket, the report concludes:
“Women are marginalised and routinely experience sexism and misogyny. The women’s game is treated as subordinate to the men’s game, and women have little or no power, voice or influence within cricket’s decision-making structures.”
The ICEC’s report makes 44 recommendations which it believes can transform cricket within the next 5-7 years.
Amongst these recommendations are calls for salary and governance equity which (if implemented) would completely remodel the landscape of cricket in England and Wales.
This includes a call for the ECB to move towards fully equal pay at domestic level by 2029 and at international level by 2030, with England women being paid (on average) the same renumeration, including match fees, central retainers and commercial payments, to the men’s white-ball team.
It also recommends that women’s salaries in the Hundred should be equalised with the men by 2025; whilst for domestic players in regional cricket, average pay and prize money should be equal by 2029.
The detail of the report allows the ECB little-to-no wriggle-room in terms of how “equality” should be calculated, and makes it very clear that just equalising match fees (for example) will be far from sufficient to meet their criteria.
The ECB are under no obligation to implement any of these recommendations, and doing so will be a huge challenge. Pay in domestic men’s cricket is largely dictated by the market, and funding the regions sufficiently such that Stars skipper Bryony Smith is paid the same as Surrey men’s captain Chris Jordan will cost the ECB an extraordinary amount of money. Equalising salaries in The Hundred alone would cost the ECB almost £6m per season. Equity will not come cheap.
On governance, the report recommends that the women’s game should have equal representation to the men’s game, including direct representation “in the same way as FCCs [the men’s First Class Counties]”.
It should be emphasised that this recommendation is explicitly for the men’s and women’s games to be represented equally, and is separate from the call for men and women to be equally present on the game’s boards and committees. To achieve this, the ECB will need to give governance representation to the women’s regions, giving them a vote in key decisions, such as the future of The Hundred – so the men’s First Class Counties will be unable to just abolish The Hundred without considering the impact on the women’s game.
Again, this won’t be straightforward. The men’s counties are big independent businesses, and there are 18 of them; whilst the women’s regions are essentially owned by the ECB, dependent on their “mother” counties for resources, and are only 8 in number. So does each region get 2¼ votes? And how do we ensure the men’s counties don’t put pressure on “their” region’s representatives to vote a particular way? (Especially given that many of the individuals working in women’s regional cricket will be hoping one day to apply for (much better paid) jobs in the men’s game?)
The ECB have promised to reflect carefully on the Commissions recommendations over the next few months. But reflecting is free and easy, and won’t change anything. The hard part is very much to come.
- Cultural change across a sport founded on misogyny is far from straightforward – by Raf Nicholson for the Guardian
CRICKETher 
Given the ICC, the body that runs world cricket, is currently engaged in blatant gender discrimination against women (that of chucking money at the Afghanistan Cricket Board, a Board which breaks the ICC own rules by not supporting a women’s cricket team, and the ICC break their own rules by allowing the ACB to remain a member) it is perhaps small wonder that such behaviour at the very top of cricket permeates down to the bottom.
Such behaviour has led national boards such as the ECB to sit smugly under the air cover the ICC has provided them. Imagine the utter horror at the ECB when Cricket Australia blew away that air cover by cancelling their men’s series against Afghanistan, an action that demonstrated it is possible to stand up for human rights, specifically gender equality. In contrast, to the best of my knowledge, the ECB had done absolutely nothing to show their disgust at the treatment of Afghanistan’s women cricketers let alone actually take an action.
Whilst on the subject of Cricket Australia, an interesting thesis would be an answer to the question “To what extent has Cricket Australia’s approach to gender equality in cricket led to their women’s team being the most dominant international team measured across all sport”
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Clanger, it’s clear you agree with CA’s decision to cancel the Afghanistan ODI series but I’m not convinced that this view is that widely shared amongst most other international boards, importantly.
There’s hardly been an outpouring of support for the decision. In particular, cricket officials, if they do agree, are keeping pretty quiet about it. From what I can tell the decision was met in almost equal amounts with derision as much as stoic respect.
No one else has followed suit yet? Far from everyone else being keen to pile onto their bandwagon, CA appear to be on their own on this one. Did they mis-read the room, as it were?
I don’t think they will or should be be punished for it either (that would have happened straight away) but it’s convenient that Australia’s ODI qualification was already confirmed before the decision came, so they didn’t need the points.
I think that, as the equity report shows, and I’m sure would be reflected in most other test playing nations’ domestic systems – the ones in power at the top don’t much care about women’s cricket. They’ll say they do, but when it comes to the crunch it’s just words.
I’m not so sure it would have been horror at the ECB upon hearing what CA did, so much as a snicker of indifference. And that’s part of the problem…
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Regardless of my view of this issue, Raf and Syd eloquently and cogently expressed the view everyone in cricket should have adopted ages ago in both The CRICKETher Weekly – Episode 147 and The CRICKETher Weekly – Episode 157.
For the record my view is rather simple (not clever enough to cope with complexity). It is based on the equivalence with the South Africa apartheid situation (as Syd expressed in 147). No one can hide from this and I will repeat a view I have previously expressed on this website: If anyone was in favour of South Africa being barred from international cricket because of apartheid than it would be plain hypocrisy to be against a ban on Afghanistan now AND if anyone was against South Africa being barred from international cricket because of apartheid than it would be plain hypocrisy to be in favour of a ban on Afghanistan now. It follows that, given world cricket did ban South Africa, then world cricket should be banning Afghanistan. If they don’t and they haven’t (and they have even dished out millions of dollars to the Afghanistan cricket board), they are taking the stance that colour matters but gender does not. As I say, its that simple.
For the record I have previously pointed out that the jury is still out as to whether Cricket Australia would refuse the play Afghanistan in a world cup (ref your point about the series they did cancel not really have any importance) but up to this point they have done what no other national Board has done and stood up for Afghanistan women – just as they stood up in 1971/72 when they cancelled their South Africa Test series because of apartheid. This provides strong evidence that Cricket Australia are not hypocrites. Sadly no other national Board has provided any evidence to defend themselves against such an accusation.
This leaves cricket is the perilous state of being morally rotten from the top down.
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Another comprehensive report painting the ECB in a damning light. What the report says about the ECB’s attitude towards women’s cricket will be very unsurprising to many readers.
It’s all very well for the ECB to apologise but what will they actually do to improve things? We need action as you say, and I strongly suspect whatever they eventually decide to implement will be woefully insufficient to make up for the lack of investment, or active harm done over the course of many years.
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“It also recommends that women’s salaries in the Hundred should be equalised with the men by 2025… the ECB will need to give (women’s regions) vote in key decisions, such as the future of The Hundred – so the men’s First Class Counties will be unable to just abolish The Hundred without considering the impact on the women’s game”
Will there even be a Hundred in 2025? You assume the women’s governance will be brought in before the Hundred’s fate is decided. Cynical it may be, but one easy way out of meeting any recommendations pertaining to that competition would be to scrap it before those recommendations would need to come into effect. Could this end up “escalating” the conflict surrounding the Hundred between the ECB and men’s FC Counties?
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