With women’s sport on the rise, the ‘anti-feminist backlash’ is under way

At the start of this month, the Welsh Rugby Union pledged to apologise to its women players after admitting serious failings for threatening them with withdrawal from next year’s World Cup in a contract stand-off. But that contrition was tinged with defiance.

After conducting more than 50 hours of conversations with players as part of a review set to be published later this month, the union vehemently refuted allegations of sexism.

It is hard to see how such an argument stacks up when you consider the bombshell intervention the WRU took in a desperate attempt to persuade players to sign contracts that were put in front of them. The extraordinary revelation – first reported by Telegraph Sport – that players were threatened with World Cup withdrawal if they did not sign on the dotted line within a three-hour deadline, was not only a glaring example of malpractice within a supposedly professional organisation, but one that sought to undermine its own employees.

The suggestion that the WRU, which is mired in its own financial crisis, would pull its men’s team from a World Cup – a competition considered to be the pinnacle of a player’s career – is somewhat fanciful. From a commercial standpoint, it would be unthinkable. But by readily unleashing this threat on its women’s team, the union bought into the ideology that its men’s team is superior to its women’s team, thus devaluing them both as human beings and as athletes.

By admitting it had failed to keep pace with the change happening in women’s rugby – a sport considered to be 10 years behind football in its evolution towards professionalism – the WRU contracts saga is reflective of a wider reality: women’s sport might be on the rise, but it is also riding a wave of scandal and sexism.

The kiss that changed football

This week’s Telegraph Women’s Sport Podcast, hosted by Dame Laura Kenny, delves into the murky theme of sexism, from the gender pay gaps that still remain in women’s sport to the lack of women in senior leadership positions. It also examines the culture of sexual harassment and misogyny that still pervades sporting organisations, which reared its ugly head at last year’s Fifa World Cup.

The event in Australia and New Zealand was the most watched women’s sports event in history, with a global audience of nearly two billion viewers. But it also sparked global outrage after Luis Rubiales, the former head of Spain’s football federation, kissed player Jenni Hermoso on the mouth during the trophy presentation. The incident, for which Rubiales is due to face charges of sexual assault and coercion, which he denies, became football’s own #MeToo moment and exposed years of sexism, misogyny and bullying Spanish players had suffered at the hands of a macho organisation.

The hashtag #SeAcabo (Spanish for “it’s over”) posted in the aftermath by Spain midfielder Alexia Putellas, is the title of a new Netflix documentary that features 10 players from Spain’s national team reliving the fallout from the scandal that tarnished their World Cup success. The film chronicles the grievances faced by players in the years before women’s football turned professional, when they were pinched on cheeks and generally infantilised by management.

Crucially, the documentary explores in granular detail the fallout between the federation and the national team which pre-dated the World Cup, when 15 players signed a letter demanding better working and coaching conditions following their disappointing campaign at the 2022 European Championship. The group, which became known as “Las 15”, refused to play for the team under former manager Jorge Vilda, who is described in the film as an average coach and control freak who attempted to strike fear into the players by entering their hotel rooms at night to talk with them.

Joanna Pardos, the director of the documentary, had been receptive to such issues long before the events of the World Cup final that overshadowed Spain’s victory. She was aware of the manipulation tactics Spain’s female players had suffered at the hands of the federation when she worked on a film two years earlier with Putellas, charting the career of the two-time Ballon d’Or winner. The pair had planned to do a big expose on the injustices she had faced under the federation once Putellas called time on her career.

“The Rubiales moment accelerated everything,” Pardos tells Telegraph Sport. “We didn’t have to wait until Alexia retired. In a way, the kiss was the moment that allowed the players who had been putting up with so much for all these years to begin telling their stories. They had been treated like dirt, pushed aside, silenced.”

Rubiales’s behaviour went far beyond the unwanted kiss that made global headlines. In the documentary, there is footage of him giving a cringeworthy speech to the Spanish team ahead of their World Cup semi-final against Sweden, when he asks players, “Who has more ovaries, us or them [the opposition]?” It was an incendiary reminder of how out of touch the federation was with women’s football. It also preceded Rubiales’s own crotch-grabbing antics – a gesture he said was to reflect his support of Vilda – as he stood next to members of the Spanish royal family in the stands after the final.

Backlash against increased visibility

Rubiales’s actions are indicative of wider sexism and misogyny in football. A recent Women in Football survey found that 89 per cent of women in the game had experienced discrimination in the workplace – that is up from 82 per cent in 2023.

Dr Stacey Pope, a professor in the department of sport and exercise at Durham University, has also shown that the “feminisation” or “opening up” of more opportunities for women to become fans in football over the past three decades has not automatically translated into greater gender equality.

Her recent research surveying 1,950 male UK football fans found that misogyny and sexist attitudes are commonplace, with 68 per cent of respondents displaying openly misogynistic attitudes. In echoes of the WRU contracts saga, men in this group saw women’s sport as inferior to men’s sport, particularly in relation to football. Men with progressive attitudes accounted for just a quarter of respondents.

“What we actually need to see is a gender revolution, everyone from players, managers, fans, sponsors, to take this clear and uncompromising stance against sexism and misogyny,” Dr Pope tells the podcast.

“It’s just incredible what we saw play out last year around the World Cup and thinking in the context of wider society as well and the #MeToo movement and raising public awareness of these issues, and yet we still find ourselves discussing this last male preserve, this last bastion of masculinity, this space where men can supposedly be real men in spite of the wider changes that we’re seeing in society.”

Recent research published by SurveyMonkey found that 73 per cent of people now regularly consume women’s sport – not too far behind the percentage who watch men’s sports with the same frequency (81 per cent) – while a record audience of 22.6 million viewers watched three or more minutes of women’s sport in the UK between January and May, according to research led by the Women’s Sport Trust. But this increase in visibility has inadvertently driven an increase in sexism, and what Dr Pope claims is an “anti-feminist backlash”.

“We’re talking about blatant forms of sexism in terms of hostile attitudes towards women’s participation in sport, backlash against this increased media visibility,” says Dr Pope. “[Men thinking] women don’t have any place in sport, [that] they’re useless at all of them. Women’s sports athletes being described as not as dynamic or quick or skilful, not competitive. There were crude distinctions that ran across all generations. It wasn’t like we were only seeing this with the older fans. That, for me, was one of the most disheartening things from this research. It wasn’t something that you could see was dying out, that actually many young men in society today are expressing these kinds of attitudes.”

While female athletes such as US rugby sevens star Ilona Maher are part of a new era of inspiring role models for women and girls – particularly in the realm of body positivity – there is a long way to go when it comes to challenging sporting stereotypes. Data from Women in Sport last year found that only 30 per cent of parents think playing sport is very important for their daughters, compared to 41 per cent of parents for their son.

Social media a double-edged sword

Social media has also contributed to a rise in sexist abuse that elite athletes – not to mention female sports presenters and pundits – receive. A wide-ranging study published last year by University of Stirling, Chester Business School, Bournemouth University, Durham Business School and the University of Manchester, found that female footballers are being increasingly targeted by unchecked sexist and misogynistic abuse from fans on their club’s social media accounts. The group looked at the TikTok accounts of Manchester United and Burnley FC over a six-month period and found comments of an overtly sexist and misogynistic nature were rife. Belittling players’ skills, aggressive comments showing hatred or animosity towards women, sexualisation of female athletes and the belief that a club should only share posts about male players, were all examples of the types of comments posted.

“Within football, we’ve seen people who have sadly developed eating disorders as a result of people having an opinion about their body type,” Yvonne Harrison, the CEO of Women in Football, tells the podcast. “We’re all different shapes and sizes, we’re all powerful in that different way. And I think people don’t really consider the implications of their comments and that’s really dangerous.”

England cricketer Tammy Beaumont has experienced those types of comments first-hand. She says: “You post personal pictures and people reply saying ‘You look fat’ or ‘You look pregnant’. And it’s getting worse, not better. The sad thing is the bigger the game gets, the bigger your profile gets, the bigger the platform gets, the worse it’s getting. It is one of the worst parts of the job. Social media could be used in such a great way to promote the game, but it is a double-edged sword that comes with these awful comments.

“When they have a little dig or comment on your body type... things like that just don’t have a place in sport.”

The policing of women’s bodies even happens in sports that are perceived to be the most gender equal, with Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova expressing her dismay at “unprofessional commentary” after a prominent American tennis journalist mocked her appearance during television coverage earlier this month.

Signs of progress?

Beaumont believes attitudes have changed in cricket – for example, women are now allowed in the Long Room at Lord’s – but that there are still subtler forms of sexism in the game. “It’s not necessarily the obvious sexism straight out saying women shouldn’t play cricket,” she tells the podcast. “It’s moved on from there. It’s the more micro instances of it, like kit not fitting quite right [or] just being expected to wear men’s kit.”

Yet while sexism continues to pervade at all levels of sport, from fans to the powers that be, there is also cause for optimism. Women’s sport is enjoying more coverage than ever before and is attracting billionaire investors such as American businesswoman Michele Kang and Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder and husband of Serena Williams, whose efforts in turbocharging the women’s sport landscape have made it almost unrecognisable to what it once was just five years ago.

Ohanian offered the largest prize purse for an athletics meet in track-and-field history when he staged Athlos, a first-of-its-kind all-women’s athletics meet last September. Meanwhile, Kang’s venture, Kynisca, has announced a £39.2 million global investment in improving the health of female athletes. She has also pledged £24 million to US Soccer women’s programmes and £3.14 million to the US women’s rugby sevens programme.

Change continues to ripple across the women’s sport landscape, but the challenges of navigating misogynistic and sexist attitudes remain the same.