Aitana Bonmati is the best of the best and an inspiration for kids (PIcture: AP)
You read the news Ballon d’Or winner Aitana Bonmati has announced a new four-year deal at Barcelona to make her the highest-paid woman in football.
You watch American rugby player and Paris 2024 bronze medallist Ilona Maher hobnobbing with Hollywood stars at the Emmys – and it is they who are starstruck by her.
You hear Chelsea have announced that their female players will no longer be able to stop for autographs in informal huddles every game because the chaos is just too much. Too many kids today want to meet them.
And you think: we’ve made it. We don’t need to worry for the girls.
We know that – as new Juventus signing Alisha Lehmann points out – they get paid 100 times less than their male counterparts, but then five years ago it was thousands of times. This is progress.
My job this week is hosting a conference at Google on Raising Women’s Sport and Leadership, and important people from a range of industries want to know how they can help. The opportunities are there.
We live in a world where women can make a professional career as a footballer by being good. The Women’s Super League returns this weekend and we know it will be back next season too.
The job has been done, we can move on to other fights.
Except we also live in a world where, in parts of it, women who 50 years ago could have attended university or gone out in miniskirts are banned from singing in their homes or speaking in public.
Let alone playing sport for their country. And where international rules intended to shame nations towards equality of sporting access can be ignored, just so long as the men are allowed to play.
When women play sport their communities prosper – they bring up girls who play sport too, and they normalise the benefits of exercise for everyone, as well as modelling how to manage the challenges and make exercise a lifelong habit.
Alisha Lehmann, in action for Juventus, spoke out on wage disparity (Picture: Shutterstock)
This in a world where girls as young as five feel they don’t ‘belong’ in sport. But even sadder than this is what research tells us about how boys and girls picture their futures. It’s what Women in Sport calls the ‘dream deficit’.
Though nine out of ten girls who watched last year’s Women’s World Cup said it made them feel proud and happy, only 29 per cent of girls dream they can reach the top of sport, compared with more than half of boys.
Smart girls, you might think. There are so many reasons why this is just a logical reaction to what society shows them. They can see that women’s sport is still not taken as seriously as men’s – the comment from Lehmann (pictured) about the wage disparity between her and boyfriend Douglas Luiz was greeted, inevitably, with overwhelming ridicule and aggression.
For too many men, even to mention the two football genres in the same sentence offends.
And girls recognise that their access to sport in this country is not a priority in the same way it is for boys.
It is the confirmation that in 2024 little girls don’t even let themselves dream of standing on a pitch hearing a whole crowd sing their name. That is what broke my heart.
Rugby star Ilona Maher rubbed shoulders with stars of the screen at the Emmy’s (picture: Getty)
Dreams are for everyone. Of course, we don’t all need to dream of being an international athlete. There are plenty of other dreams available, and you don’t have to commit. For some months of my childhood I was planning to becomeboth a chess grandmaster and an air hostess.
But the point is the internalised limitation. The self-censorship.
Societal cues tell us a lot about what we can and cannot do. And many of these are useful, lest we pick our noses openly or fail to establish small talk about the weather when in offices.
But when society is still telling little girls they dare not dream Aitana Bonmati’s dream, society needs to have a word with itself.
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