A Say on Equal Pay

“When I was told there was going to be equal pay for men and women, I pretty much cried,” said current World No. 1 Stephanie Gilmore, on the WSL website. This week the WSL announced that from 2019 women would receive the same prize money as men. This is the right thing to do, and a good turnaround from what many felt was an indefensible position on the matter, earlier this year: “Men get double the prize money only because there are double the competitors,” said Will Hayden-Smith, explaining that the old ratio system the WSL applied that was based on the number of entrants in contests.” But the WSL saw the light ad made history on Wednesday by scrapping this ratio system from 2019. Why is this the right thing to do even though there are fewer women entering surf contests? Well, it’s important to consider why fewer women enter. In a 2017 article in The Guardian, Layne Beachley says that when she first started surfing, first as a young girl at Manly Beach and then on the ASP World Tour, there was a “steadfast belief that women didn’t have the right to be in the water, and nor […]