‘I was being paid €30,000 and my male equivalent was on half a million-plus’

The stark reality of sport’s gender pay gap is laid bare in the latest episode of the Telegraph Women’s Sport Podcast.

Dani Rowe, an Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist, reveals she was paid a fraction of her male counterpart when competing as a road cyclist in 2018.

“I can be brutally honest now I’m out of the sport, but I was being paid €30,000 and my male equivalent, if we look at performance only, would have been on half a million-plus,” she says.

Yet despite that huge gulf in earnings, Rowe does not believe the sport should introduce the same minimum salaries for men and women – at least not yet.

“Ultimately, if we don’t have the fans, we haven’t got the money, we haven’t got the sponsorship, so this is about being a better product, being more exciting,” Rowe says in conversation with Dame Laura Kenny on the podcast.

“It’s a really tough subject because I agree with the minimum salary point of view.

“But we’ve got these teams that genuinely cannot afford these minimum salaries and they’re going to be wiped out, which means young girls will not have a pathway, a genuine pathway, to get to the top of the sport. It’s a very, very, very fragile space.

‘Big brands are taking this leap because they see the big opportunity’

“It’s growing because these big brands are taking this leap because they see the big opportunity within the women’s space because of the broadcast that we’re now getting on TV.

“It’s how to look after that lower level. In terms of the salaries there’s still a lot of growth to be done. But I do think we’re moving in the right direction.”

The gender pay gap is an issue across industries, not just sport, but there are examples of the benefits of closing it. Take Lewes FC, who became the first football club to pay their men’s and women’s players equally in 2017.

Maggie Murphy, the club’s former CEO, emphasised on the podcast how women’s football teams, which are often reliant on a men’s side, can succeed on their own.

“This small club, Lewes FC, had taken what I thought was this radical decision: they were a small part of the problem but they were going to be a big part of the solution to say they were going to be the first club in the world to pay its male and female players equally, to split revenue equally,” says Murphy.

“So whoever generates sponsorship money comes into the pot and you split it because that’s how they wanted to even things up.

“I joined shortly after and every year it was like a different club because that investment was able to unlock so much more potential.

“So at the very beginning the women’s team were not making any money but by the end they were making hundreds of thousands of pounds and generating a lot more than the men’s side were.

“And so equality was good for the men’s side because it pulled them up. I think it’s really important that you are a whole club, you are thinking about the men’s side and the women’s side.”

How to make women’s sports financially viable

The Lewes example demonstrates the commercial value in women’s sports. After all, Deloitte expects £1 billion in global revenues to be generated by women’s elite sports in 2024.

The Women’s Super League has agreed a £45 million three-year deal with Barclays to sponsor the league as well as a record £65 million five-year TV deal with Sky Sports and the BBC.

Supporters of women’s sports are also 25 per cent more likely to purchase sponsor products than men’s sport fans while data from Mastercard’s Economics Institute shows a 16 per cent rise in the average spend at local bars when Arsenal Women played at the Emirates last season.

The potential is clear, but how can women’s sports tap into it more effectively to become financially sustainable? Star power, the value of visibility and broadening brand appeal are all discussed on the podcast.

“We have to almost sell ourselves, that’s what people are interested in, us as a personality, as an individual, our day-to-day lives,” says Rowe. “People have got so many followers because people are interested in what they’re doing and what they’re buying and what they’re using.”

Murphy stresses the importance of having free-to-air coverage alongside pay-TV partners to achieve both visibility and revenue.

“We’ve seen historic deals for broadcast, which means that you will be able to switch on your television and see these female athletes almost to the point where it feels normal,” she says.

“That visibility and broadcast are the things that allow the ability to unlock sponsorships and provide value to the clubs that are actually investing a lot of money year to year to provide the environments and the coaching and the facilities to create these female athletes.”

Brands are also recognising that women’s sports can help showcase their products to a new audience – and a different one to the traditional sports market.

Jenny Mitton, who is an expert in sponsorship as a managing partner at M&C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment, says: “What’s really exciting is new brands coming into the space that market to different audiences.

“Once you can see brands coming in that service different audiences than we’re used to football; so it’s not betting, it’s not booze – that for me shows a signal of change.”

Listen or watch the full episode for more insight into the financial evolution of women’s sport.