One Step Forward and Two Steps Back?: Pandemic Effects and Women's Sport in Australia

Women’S Professional Sport In Australia: Making Inroads?

The past five years have seen women’s professional sport in Australia make inroads like never before. Women’s leagues, including the Women’s Big Bash Cricket League (WBBL) and the Women’s Australian Rules Football League (AFLW) continue to demonstrate an important shift in the Australian sport landscape (Sherry & Taylor, 2019). In part through professionalised pathways the mentioned leagues help promote wider and more inclusive cultural conversations, challenging stereotypes of women in sport (Pavlidis, Toffoletti & Saunders, 2020).

In connection, women’s professional sport is positioning itself as more than an apparatus for commercial gain. Women’s sport leagues, teams and individual athletes are increasingly using their professional status as a platform to engage with broader social issues relevant to gender and other inequities. Looking abroad Nneka Ogwumike’s 2018 Player Tribune piece in part amplifies this commitment. As a professional basketballer and president of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) Ogwumike pronounced that the WNBA ‘is not just about business. This is deeply personal. This is about the kind of world we want to live in’ (Ogwumike, 2018).

Nneka Ogwumike’s remarks echo the WNBPA leagues long standing and ongoing purposeful commitment to social justice issues, ‘today, challenging the status quo is a hallmark of the league’s players. They pushed the envelope long before it came into vogue … and led the way in protesting social injustice and racism’. From collectivist action to individual athletes taking a stand, the league’s activism is described as unparalleled among contemporary professional sports leagues (Abrams & Weiner, 2020).