Despite everything, in 2024 men still get the mine
and women still get the shaft!
Six years ago today, the WSL announced that female
athletes would receive the same prize money as men across all its
events.
A landmark decision and a first among US-based sports
leagues.
The equity-minded folks of the WSL followed that up in 2022 by
fully aligning the stops on the Women’s Championship Tour with the
Men’s, bringing the top surf ladies of the world back to hallowed
and dangerous locations like Pipeline and Teahupo’o.
Gender equality locked and loaded.
Or is it?
Every surfer knows that the most valuable currency among surfers
is not money, but waves. And if we look at equity in terms of
quality waves, it paints a very different picture.
Sunset notwithstanding, the first half of this year was a
shocker for waves on the Championship Tour. Surf fans endured the
spectacle of pivotal heats going down in blown-out, marginally small or inconsistent conditions.
(As an aside, you can always tell a crap day of competitive
surfing by how the highlights video is edited – unremarkable single
manoeuvres intercut with lots of b-roll? Them some shitty
waves…)
If you’ve clicked on the links above, you may have noticed a
pattern: the ladies feature heavily.
The picture becomes even clearer if we look at the numbers.
Behold my pie charts, coded in Surfline-speak.
the finger!
The men have actually done OK this year. They’ve only had to
deal with six days (out of 32) held in “poor” or “poor to fair”
waves.
Meanwhile, the long-suffering women of the CT have done nearly a
third of their surfing (nine out of 28 days) in “poor” or “poor to
fair” waves. For ladies who were unlucky enough to suffer the
dreaded mid-season cut, over half of their run days were on the
crappy end of things.
The tragedy of this is that when the girls have been sent out in
epic conditions, we’ve seen some all-time performances: Molly
Picklum charging a perfect Pipeline pit that would’ve got at least
a 9 in a men’s heat, and then whacking a massive Sunset section
that many male pros would dodge; Tatiana Weston-Webb earning a
proper 10 in a throaty Teahupo’o pit; Erin Brooks threading caves
and whacking sections with whiplike poise at Cloudbreak.
The consensus is clear among surf fans, male and female alike:
the women’s competition has been more exciting than the men’s this
year.
So why are we sending them (and not the men) out in blown-out
side-shore slop in Portugal, tiny Pipeline and even smaller
Margaret River?
Sure, we’ve come a long way since the bad old days when the
women would be sent out once the tide or wind had gone real bad.
But we’re still far from the promised land of equity and
equality.
Jerusalem next year?
Meanwhile, there is another dimension by which the WSL is
unequal.
At the start of each year, the Championship tour boasts a stable
of 34 men and just 16 women. At the mid-year cut that’s whittled
down to 22 men and 10 women. At no point does the number of women
on tour reach even half the number of men.
(There’s another statistic for you).
It’s hard to argue that we need more than 16 women on tour at
this point in women’s surfing. If you look down the competitive
ranks, there’s just a of couple ladies who have never featured as
full-time competitors on the Championship Tour and who look like
they belong there. That’s Erin Brooks and Sierra Kerr. Erin’s well
on her way to clinching her spot on the CT for 2025, and Sierra
will follow soonish.
What’s easier to argue is that 34 men is far too many. There are
some talents who would miss out on qualification if we dropped the
number of surfers on tour. But it’s indisputable that the current
men’s draw is bloated to the max in terms of scheduling. Before the
cut, the first 16 men’s heats eliminates just four surfers. That’s
over a full day of competition spent lightly rearranging the
basement of the rankings. Sometimes, that first day of
near-meaningless heats has wasted the very best conditions of the
waiting period.
My favourite fix here is to rip the band-aid off and cut the
men’s draw down to 23 surfers. This would not only move the number
of surfers on tour to a more equitable split, but also make it
easier to send the women out in waves that don’t suck.
What’s more, the wave quality for the men would improve too.
With less heats to run, it’s way easier for contest directors to
be picky about the conditions. For evidence, just look at how much
better the second half of the year has been compared to the first
half.
Huey has been slightly kinder to the WSL in recent months, but
the difference in the pie charts below is principally that events
before the cut need around five full days to run, and after the cut
only need three days.
waves in back half of year but still men get the mine, women get
the shaft!
Will the WSL do the right thing and move towards both gender
equality and a better quality product?
Probably not this year, or the next.
But as the shift of Finals Day from Lower Trestles this year to
Cloudbreak next year illustrates, if enough people start calling
bullshit on their current modus operandi they’ll eventually
bite.
