Equal Prize Money Distribution in freeride competitions - a letter to IFSA
- Rachel Little
- Jan 16, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 17, 2020
This week the Freeride World Tour announced their decision to award equal prize money to male and female competitors. While most people seemed stoked with the decision and feel like it’s about time, there are still lots of negative opinions out there. I’m posting this now because although it’s not exactly the same situation, it felt relevant.
The IFSA (International Freeskiers and Snowboarders Association) is the sanctioning body for freeride competitions in North and South America. Founded by Shane McConkey in 1996, they joined with the Freeride World Tour in the 2014/2015 season to unify FWQ events around the world. This year, they put out a call among athletes to discuss their views on prize money distribution. This is the response I sent them.
Hi IFSA!
First of all let me say this is a really tough question, and I really appreciate that you are giving it serious thought and letting the athletes voice their opinions on it. Even I, as a massive feminist and an advocate for equality in sports, had a tough time putting my thoughts together and I can understand a lot of the reasons for offering proportional prize money.
I think the answer depends not only on what is ‘fair’ but what your goals are as a freeriders’ association. I understand that it’s statistically more unlikely to win your category when there are more competitors, who are perhaps taking bigger risks for a shot at the podium. But if your goal is to work towards equality in the sport then I think you have to move towards giving equal prize money - here’s why.
Being a woman in a man’s sport is tough. Studies show that from the moment we are born, we are warned about risk and encouraged from birth to ‘be careful’ much more than boys are. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0193397399000155 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opinion/sunday/why-do-we-teach-girls-that-its-cute-to-be-scared.html) Society teaches us to downplay our abilities, minimise our ambitions and to strive towards different goals that probably don’t involve risking our lives, whereas boys are constantly getting the opposite message. Getting to the point where you are ready to throw yourself off cliffs in a competition mean you’ve already overcome a lot of mental hurdles, and probably encountered a lot of sexism along the way. To counter this imbalance, we should be looking for any way we can encourage girls and women to compete.
In my first FWQ competition I ever entered, we were told by the organisers that the women’s categories had to run after the men’s categories. When we asked why, we were given a number of reasons by the organisers but most came down to ‘the women’s categories just aren’t as interesting’ - ‘women don’t backflip’, ‘women aren’t as strong as men’, ‘the men have to go first to make it safe for the women’ being a couple of verbatim quotes that stuck with me.
Last year, I was in Hakuba, Japan at the same time as the first leg of the Freeride World Tour. Chatting to one of the judges in the bar the night before, I asked him what time we should show up to watch the comp the next day. ‘It starts at 9am,’ he said, ‘But the men start at 11, that’s when things will get interesting.’ (And this was a FWT judge!!!!!)
I like to think that this would not have happened in an IFSA competition, and I have really noticed the difference competing in North America, where attitudes are different and competitor numbers are far more equal between categories - in part thanks to laws like title IX, which gives us a good look at what happens when you equalise funding in sports - arguably responsible for US women being internationally dominant in everything from soccer to tennis to gymnastics. But the fact that those attitudes still exist around the world is shocking. The casual awarding of unequal prize money just enforces those views that many men in the skiing and snowboarding world still hold, even if they don’t always voice them.
To spectators that know the ins and outs of the competitions, it might be clear that the women’s categories are awarded less prize money because they usually have smaller subscription rates, and the more athletes enter a category, the more entry fees there are to pool to draw the prize money from. But to outsiders looking at the athletes holding up their novelty checks on the podium? They won’t be familiar with those arguments. Imagine a young girl watching the awards, not knowing the complex reasoning behind the proportional division. The message she’s receiving is that this is something for guys, that women are second class citizens and they just aren’t as good. Unfortunately that just reinforces other messages she gets from our society every day.
We’re not in it for the money. If we were, we would be investment bankers, not skiers and snowboarders. The amount of money spent per competitor on these events far outweighs the amount we stand to win, with not only entry fees and lift tickets but travel, accommodation, food and bar tabs (a necessary expense). Even the sponsored athletes at the very top of their game are usually paying out of pocket and even if they win they won’t break even. Equal payout might provide more incentive for girls to compete, but the prize money is mostly symbolic. And if you want that symbol to be one of hope for the young girls watching - you should make it equal.
In this blog post from the ski diva, Wendy Clinch takes a closer look at the gender pay gap in skiing.
If you want to share your thoughts on this topic with IFSA, you can find the link to the survey here:
Comments