When I was a kid, I loved Weetbix cards. At the time, it made perfect sense the All Blacks had their own collectables. They were the All Blacks!
But looking back, where were the Black Ferns’ cards?
They’re six-time world champions. They’ve won double the number of world cups the All Blacks have, yet experience a 73% pay gap with their male counterparts, according to Stuff.
Historically, this discrepancy has been explained away by the fact that men’s sport generates more revenue, so male athletes can be paid more. But women’s sport receives less investment and media coverage because it’s assumed to attract smaller audiences, limiting its ability to build a wide platform and generate more revenue.
Because of this cycle, women’s sport has had to go in unique and often harmful directions with its advertising to attract attention.
Romee, M. (n.d.). Running. Dupe.
The Matildas are the Australian national women’s football team. They’ve represented Australia at the FIFA Women’s World Cup eight times and at the Olympics five times. Despite their success, they were almost unheard of before the 2000s and struggled to get media coverage. According to Stuff, only a handful of friends and family attended each of their matches.
In 1999, the team were getting ready for the Sydney Olympics. The government gave the Matildas a small amount of money to live on and started paying their coach. Money was still tight for players, and most had to work part-time jobs to afford to live despite being professional full-time athletes.
To help fund their team and raise visibility, the Matildas agreed to be part of a nude calendar being produced by a freelance publisher.
Not all players participated, including striker Sacha Wainwright, who was 27 at the time.
"My thinking about it was that I wanted women to be recognised as athletes and over-sexualising sport was something that didn't sit well with me", she said in an interview with Stuff.
"Instead of being a calendar that the girls could put on their walls, it attracted a much wider male audience, because of the images."
Wainwright said the calendar felt too much like porn, and many players felt ashamed that it took them sexualising themselves and their passion to be noticed.
The calendar was a huge success. The previously unknown Matildas had a much higher fan turnout at games and were being asked to speak at events. However, some players still feel the calendar spectacle undermined their later success, with its legacy stopping the team from forming its own distinct identity.
During the 2004 Olympic Games campaign, former Matilda Tal Karp noted that the only newspaper coverage she saw of her team was related to the calendar printed five years earlier.
"I wanted our team to be recognised for our skill, strength and resilience on the field. Not for how the team looked without their gear on in 1999", she said.
Other female athletes have had similar experiences.
In 2011, five German under-20 footballers posed naked for Playboy the day before the FIFA Women’s World Cup. The magazine was on stands throughout the tournament.
One of the women commented to The Local, “With these photos, we want[ed] to disprove the cliche that all female footballers are butch.”
According to an article by Rasmussen et al (2021), advertising specifically relies on gender stereotyping to quickly convey messages.
“Although men and women are becoming more equal in the number of appearances in commercials, the nature of their appearances still differs by gender”, they said.
“Commercials reinforce traditional gender roles by depicting individuals in a stereotypical manner, such as presenting women in more decorative roles or in ways that emphasize their visual and aesthetic appeal or portraying men as authoritative and in positions of power.”
This is certainly true for the nude calendar and Playboy shoot, where the athletes were made to pose naked or in little clothing to emphasise their ‘aesthetic appeal’.
More recently, a Novig ad has caused controversary for the way actress Sydney Sweeney used her ‘visual appeal’, appearing in a decorative manner to sell sport related gambling.
In the ad, she poses naked with an assortment of sports equipment, repeating the line “just sports”.
Another recent example is the 2024 Bluebella Lingerie ‘Strong is Beautiful’ campaign, that saw Olympic rugby players kicking a ball around in nothing but underwear for an ad they claimed would highlight female dedication, thus encouraging girls to play sport.
Women’s sport has never lacked skill, strength, or success. It simply lacked the respect to be marketed on those terms. While this is slowly changing, it’s disappointing that brilliant athletes still feel forced by the system to use aesthetics just to prove they belong in spaces they’ve already earned.
The question we should be asking isn’t why these women agreed to be sexualised, it’s why the sporting world still can’t seem to pay attention unless they do?