Equal by Nature

“Equal by Nature”: The World Surf League’s slogan for their most recent and noteworthy campaign. Formerly known as the ASP, Association of Surfing Professionals, the World Surf League (WSL) is surfing’s governing organization. Like all other sports at the moment, the WSL represented an unequal balance of prize money between their male and female athletes.

The WSL’s main justification for this imbalance was that the women (18 competing on the world tour) compete against half of the surfers to the men (36 on the world tour) so therefore aren’t doing the same amount of work to earn them the same pay. While this justification is undeniable, it still does not serve as fair or right.

First off, the women have to train just as much as the men do to get to the top of their tour and become world champions. Secondly, athletes have no control over how many others they compete against, so why are the women being punished for the decision WSL has made to have their tour be half the size of the men? While they may be surfing against half the amount, at the end of the day, the first place winner of the women still gets a significant cut in their pay check.

This prize money issue came to a head when a picture went viral of a teenage boy and girl from South Africa had both just won their respective divisions. The girl’s paycheck was half the amount of the boy’s. That did not sit well with the whole ‘Me Too’ and women’s equality movement. WSL and its leaders were criticized for not supporting women’s surfing or women’s athletics. The responses WSL provided were the same ones heard many time before and obviously not good enough anymore.

Finally, WSL made a stance. They made a stance to pay both male and female divisions equally starting in 2019. This makes them the first US-based sporting organization to pay both male and female athletes equally. This addressed an issue that expands farther than surfing and it’s great to see surfing, a sport considered to be a relatively small industry, take a massive lead in this international sporting issue.

There has been an overwhelming positive response from inside and outside the surfing industry and has attracted the attention of not only surfing fans, but athletes that have been fighting for this cause long before it became a social mission. While some have counter-argued that the women now technically get paid more than the men since they are still required to compete in less heats, I see it as a necessary first step to further women’s surfing and inspire the younger generation of women to pursue surfing as a profession. When that younger generation grows, the women will have a larger field and then be able to compete at the same number of the men. It’s not a change that will happen overnight and will take time to evolve since women’s sports has been stuck in one way for so long. In the end, WSL made a massive step for not just surfing but women’s athletics in general and hopefully this is just the snowball that starts an avalanche amongst other sporting organizations to follow in similar footsteps.

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