‘Is this really what people want to watch?’: The NRLW and NRL gender disparities

With the 2024 Olympic Games having achieved gender parity in participation, it’s easy to get swept up in thinking gender parity in sports is evident and progressing everywhere.

However, there are still some blinding gaps on our home soil. The development of women’s sports in Australia has come a long way, but there are still many challenges, disparities, and misconceptions that need to be overcome.

Rugby league, one of the most popular sports in Australia, is governed by the Australian Rugby League Commission (ARL). A women’s league, the National Rugby League Women’s Premiership (NRLW), was developed in 2018, 110 years after the development of the men’s league, the National Rugby League (NRL).

Men as default

You might not know about the NRLW – and how could you be expected to? If you want to find information on it, you could head to the NRLW website – if it existed. Instead, you’re directed to the NRL website, where you’ll enter what can only be described as a maze to try and find any information about the NRLW.

Once you get into the NRLW subset of the NRL website, you then need to scroll past the judiciary news, injury list, match reports, and outdated team lists to find key information on draws, ladder, players, and statistics.

If the Australian Rugby League Commission wants people to be invested and to take the game seriously, they should make the effort to make the NRLW website more accessible. As it stands, this inaccessibility may dissuade casual viewers from becoming engaged in the game.

In contrast, the Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW) has its own website that allows easy access to view statistics, draw, player information, news, etc. Although it shares the same domain as the Australian Football League (AFL; www.afl.com.au/aflw ), reinforcing the notion that women’s sports are simply a subset of men’s sports, the AFLW website is easily accessible, with all the equivalent information as the men’s website.

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Following these initial explorations of the websites, I (Mitcham) then explored the NRLW on various social media sites, considering the perspective of a casual NRLW viewer.

I was disheartened to find that since its inception, players and officials in the NRLW have been subjected to sexist commentary and criticism unrelated to their abilities or skills, but rather their appearance or gender. For instance, women referees receive hundreds of comments and messages, 90% of which are sexist in nature.

This negative social media discourse, combined with the inaccessibility of the website, could influence a casual viewer’s engagement.

As an avid viewer with extensive knowledge of, and experience with, the game, I wanted to further explore statistics surrounding the sport in order to evaluate the validity of the negative discourse. Particularly, I was interested in key themes that frequently arise in match commentary, media reports, and fan discussions – pay, attendance and viewership, and general quality of play.

Full-time play on part-time pay

Pay is often a major discussion in women’s sports, with women athletes being paid far less than male counterparts, despite playing the same game at the same level. In 2023 – the sixth season of the NRLW, and the first for which accurate data was available – the average NRLW wage was $38,250.

This means NRLW athletes only earn 61% of the wage of an average working woman ($62,645). Given that these athletes are expected to play full-time, incorporating training and media requirements on top of matches, this figure is inexcusable, as it’s only marginally above the poverty line. Additionally, players have expenses that most workers do not.

In contrast, in 2023, NRL players on average earned 425% of the wage of an average working man ($370,000 v $87,125).

An argument often made when it comes to pay is that the NRLW players play fewer games per season than do NRL players, so their pay is lower. Nevertheless, NRLW players still earn about $10,000 less than NRL players per game, on average.

Many NRLW players have lamented the hard choice that they have faced – to either quit their jobs to pursue an NRLW career or, devastatingly, walk away from their dreams of playing professional rugby league due to the insecurity and unequal expectations of the profession relative to the pay they receive.

Some NRLW players join local leagues or state leagues in the off-season to maintain their fitness and game skills, but doing so increases their risk of injury and fatigue before the NRLW season.

‘No one watches women’s sport’

A common argument used to discredit or diminish the NRLW is that “no one watches women’s sport”, with women’s rugby often being attributed as a second-class sport compared to men’s rugby.

If you look at the raw numbers, you’ll notice a substantial difference in the number of people watching or attending NRL and NRLW games, but there are several factors that influence this outcome – the times for NRLW games are inconvenient for people to attend; the stadiums for NRLW games have a smaller capacity than the stadiums for NRL games; there’s less advertising for the women’s game.

It is important to consider the growth of the sport and, particularly, the percentage increases in viewership and attendance.

The NRLW had a 180% increase in total viewership from 2022 to 2023. This increase followed the decision to move all NRLW matches from pay-per-view to free-to-air, suggesting the option to broadcast all games live and free on Channel Nine was a beneficial change. In contrast, in the corresponding time period, the NRL had a 9% increase in total viewership.

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The 2024 season also marked the first year the women were able to play in the three-game State of Origin series, the annual competition between New South Wales and Queensland. Any player who made their representative debut in either NSW or Queensland is eligible to play for their respective team.

The series comes with a match bonus of $6000 for the women and $15,000 for the men, and the opportunity to represent their state on a national stage.

From 2021 to 2024, NRLW State of Origin attendance increased by 307%, compared to 66% for the NRL State of Origin series*.

Further, NRLW grand finals have had a 417% increase in attendance since 2021, compared with a 108% increase for the NRL.

‘Schoolboys league is better’

Beyond the statistics of growth that show that people do watch women’s sports, and that viewership is increasing, another element is that people believe that the NRLW is “too boring”, “unprofessional”, or “not to the same standard” as the NRL. Some points people commonly bring up to support this argument are the margin, errors, and completion rate.

Simply put, the margin is the difference in scores between the winning team and the losing team. A greater margin is indicative of a large discrepancy in the quality of the two teams playing, whereas a smaller margin is indicative of a more competitive, and thus more interesting, game between two well-matched teams.

From 2021 to 2023, the mean margin in the NRL was 16.3, with a median margin of 18.0, whereas in the NRLW, both the mean and median margin were 14.0.

The difference between the average margins in each league were not statistically significant; however, on average, the NRLW has a smaller margin, meaning the teams are more evenly matched than are teams in the NRL, supporting the argument that the former’s games may be more exciting.

Another element often criticised about the NRLW is the number of errors per game, with the perception there are more errors in the women’s league than the men’s.

An error is any act that stops play or forces a turnover (that is, the other team is given possession of the ball). The NRLW had fewer errors on average per game than the NRL, with a mean of 9.7 errors and a median of 9.9 errors per game, compared to the NRL’s mean of 10.6 and median of 10.8.

Both the means and medians are statistically significantly different. These statistics challenge the argument that the NRLW has more errors per game, forcing more stoppages or turnovers.

Read more: What does feminism have to do with sport? Reflecting on the Women’s World Cup

Finally, the completion rate – the percentage of times a team holds the ball for a full set of six tackles (that is, without an error) – is often used to determine the quality of a game. It’s one of the key elements, because higher completion rates are associated with greater win rates.

The NRL has a higher completion rate on average than does the NRLW (77.5% v 74.4%, a statistically significant difference). However, the range of completion rates isn’t particularly different within each league (NRL 8%, NRLW 9%).

These figures show that in both the NRL and NRLW, there are small differences between the best and worst teams in regard to completion rate, although on average, the NRL has better completion rates than the NRLW.

A chance to enhance

As shown, professional women’s rugby league in Australia has a promising future. In addition to the challenging sport for which these women put their bodies on the line each week, they’re overcoming sexist barriers and obstacles, and surpassing expectations placed on them.

If the Australian Rugby League Commission allocates resources effectively – supporting grassroots leagues, engaging with players to understand their needs, improving website navigation, and building strong pathways – then the NRLW has the potential to thrive as a major sport in Australia.

By prioritising accessibility for viewers and providing adequate support for players, the league can enhance the quality of the game, driving increased viewership and attendance.

So, is this really what people want to watch? We would argue that, yes, it really is.

*Note that the NRL data is from 2021 to 2023, as the 2024 data was unavailable at the time of writing.