July Monthly Essay
The World Cup has created a breakthrough for having the first referee team consisting of all-women and now FIFA 2026 joined the party by having an all-women referee team. People will see this and say: “What is the significance of having an all-women team in a sports competition?” However, the majority of people don’t realize it really is significant and that inequality is spreading even within the sports community. When we talk about inequality, we always think about social issues that revolve around women's rights and gender-based violence that is happening to them, without us realizing that sports are an overlooked field for gender inequality. In sports, female coaches have been undermined, underestimated, and dismissed despite their fulfilled qualifications. This, unfortunately, created an opportunity disparity between men and women in sports. Women coaches, despite their high qualifications, have been associated with their biological characteristics and placed them to jobs they were overqualified for.
Hannah Dingley, girls’ head of academy at Manchester City Football Club has shared her experience of being placed in an overqualified job. She highlighted, “I’ve found myself only offered jobs teaching the under-9s, despite being more qualified than many of the male coaches hired for the older age groups.” She continues, “The assumption was that I was too maternal, empathetic and soft to work at the top level of elite sport.” Emma Hayes, the former manager of Chelsea women, said, “The realities are that male privilege has always been at the centre of football in this country.” This gets worse when there are just a few countries that enforce a constitution about equality in sportsmanship. The deeply-rooted bias of male dominance in the sports field created an unsettled environment for women to play sports. A problem that has to be resolved.
Thankfully, this problem is being addressed by FIFA. In 2022, FIFA created a ‘football unites the world’ campaign addressing the gender inequality in the sports field, specifically in football. FIFA has created awareness that women should be treated equally in the sports field because of how female athletes are paid less than male athletes despite being in the same category. This prompted several national federations, such as England, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Slovenia, and the United States, to pay their male and female athletes who represent their countries equally. This is obviously leaving other countries not to pay their men and women athletes the same amount of compensation. Underrepresentation and underestimation are the challenges women athletes face in this field because of their association towards the biological characteristics. But fear not, the awareness that FIFA has created moves their national federation to broaden its perspective on the problem of gender equality in the sports field. From the FIFA 2022 campaign and the FIFA 2026, all-women referees have shown their commitment to go towards a better steps towards equal sportsmanship. Hopefully, this is not the peak of their journey, but it is just a destination of the long road ahead of gender equality in the sports field.