Mottley calls for level playing field in pay structure in WI cricket

By Rawle Toney

Both the West Indies men’s and women’s cricket teams should be paid equally.

That is the view of Prime Minister Mia Mottley who said there was a need to create a level playing field in sports across the region.

This issue has been a longstanding concern, as exemplified by former West Indies women’s captain, Deandra Dottin, who expressed her frustration back in 2016 regarding the “ridiculous” pay disparity between elite male and female cricketers.

Back then, Cricket West Indies (CWI) women’s retainer contracts ranged between $1500 and $3000 a month while their male counterparts earned anywhere between $100,000 and $150,000 a year.

And while delivering the keynote address at the 22nd Frank Worrell Memorial Lecture, held at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Faculty of Sport on Tuesday night, Mottley raised the topic.

The Prime Minister said the Government of Barbados had removed the “awful discriminatory act where only the men who play for West Indies now benefit from duty-free cars in this country as well.”

She added: “Equal pay for equal work. And even if you say, as someone once  told me, well you know there’s a lot more money in the men’s game, the truth is that the West Indies has already been relegated to two Tests and two or three ODIs so the money has already started to diminish, but the men are still paid here and the women are paid three to five times less.

“Indeed the women are paid less or let me put it another way, the men are paid more for a regional game than the women get for a non-regional game.”

Mottley contended that with creative marketing strategies, CWI would be able to attract sponsorship and businesses to women’s cricket in the region.

“But what bothers me is that because there has not been a similar club structure and a similar domestic structure to be able to get the best out of our girls, we are still not, therefore, dominating the game in a way that we could if we had a different approach to the development of girls’ cricket and women’s cricket at our national territory levels and not just as a team for cricket West Indies,” the Prime Minister said.

“We will not do well until we remove all vestiges of discrimination from this game in the same way that we must remove all vestiges of discrimination from our societies.”

In 2015, Professor Eudine Barriteau chaired a CARICOM governance review panel.

The report stated that while women cricketers are very committed to the game, their compensation packages are minimal, where ten senior players have ‘decent’ retainer contracts. The sharpest difference is at the regional level where the women receive an allowance of US $150.00 for two weeks.

rawletoney@barbadostoday.bb ]]>