The Bare Minimum

The mark of a great athlete is his technique. His skill. His championship wins. 

The mark of a great female athlete is how much scrutiny she faces. How often she’s used for clickbait headlines. How expensive her athleisure wear is. 

Think about the best female athletes you know: Serena Williams, Simone Biles, Tonya Harding, Alysa Liu. Every single one of them has something in common, and it’s not just the incredibly lengthy hours of work put into their craft. It’s the intense pressure placed upon them. This pressure doesn’t feel like the kind that comes from people wanting you to do well. Rather, it feels like a demand to go above and beyond whatever their male counterparts are doing. For women, the bare minimum is a man’s best. 

It’s not just the expectations, or countless critiques. It’s astounding how consistently female athletes are told how they should behave, or what they can do to appear more palatable to a wider sports audience. Serena Williams, one of the most accomplished tennis players of all time, has received criticism her entire career for being “aggressive” or “too loud”—things that tennis star Nick Kyrgios is known and often loved for. For Kyrgios, it’s entertaining. It’s part of his charm, what makes him annoyingly lovable. For Williams, it’s unsightly. 

Novak Djokovic can smash a racket all he wants, and it’s framed as a healthy release of male anger. If Naomi Osaka does the same, she’s hysterical, letting her emotions get the better of her. 

Male athletes need all the mental health support they can get, since it’s still not talked about. It’s taboo for a man to feel his feelings, so the resources need to be there should they want them. For women, however, the message is different: suck it up. 

Take, for example, Simone Biles: the most decorated gymnast in history. What is one of the first things that comes up when you search her name? “Simone Biles husband.’ 

In fact, in a 2023 interview her husband Jonathan Owens stated that he was the “catch” in their relationship and that he had no idea who Biles was before they started dating. The influx of Google searches about Jonathan Owens that followed were mostly due to the fact people had no idea of who he was. One person stated that if Biles’ name had not been in the headline, they wouldn’t have known why the situation—or Owens—was relevant at all. Biles’ determination stops at nothing, especially not for jealous—even if unconsciously so—partners. 

There is only so much a woman can achieve before, somehow, we are led back to the idea that there must be a man behind her success. Sure, her husband is an okay NFL player, but the idea that the Simone Biles must have his support to thank for her own grit and determination is bizarre. 

I speak about her determination specifically because another common search auto-fill result is “Simone Biles documentary.” Her documentary details her rise to multiple championship wins, then her so-called “fall from grace” and finally, her comeback. 

This fall from grace? A much needed mental health break in 2020. 

After becoming the first gymnast to qualify for all six gymnastic medal events at the Tokyo Olympics, she decided to step down to take care of her mental health. She was greeted by a global response calling her selfish and a disappointment to the American Olympic team. 

Just goes to show that even 30 World Championship medals—all but seven of them gold—and 11 Olympic medals aren’t enough to earn a woman the grace to take a break. 

It’s not fair, and it hasn’t been fair in the history of… well, ever. 

I sat down with Wellington Blaze player Hannah Francis to talk about how female cricket players are treated compared to their male counterparts. 

“People are always harping on about the difference in standard between the men’s and women’s games in New Zealand,” Francis says, referring to comments on social media. “But the men’s team are fully paid athletes. The women are only semi-professional. To make a living, we still have to study and work alongside our cricket, meaning we don’t have all day to train like the men are able to.” 

There has always been a big difference in paying male and female athletes. This is no different in New Zealand. Female cricket players at the top of their league will likely still be paid less than the lowest-ranked male cricket player. 

“Spectators don’t realise that. [Their comments are] harsh as women’s cricket is on the rise in New Zealand and the leaps and bounds being made in the major associations at the moment are great to be a part of. Considering the difference in time and resources between the two games, I’d say the women do a great job, and it would be nice for [the public] to appreciate this too.” 

World Indoor Cricket Federation Player Bree James and I also discussed the behaviours enabled by men, for men, in the sport. Why is it that the men’s locker room has so many holes in its walls—holes that become the entire organisation’s problem to fix? It’s not the women doing that. Maybe the people we don’t usually think to blame are the ones getting hysterical? 

James agrees with a laugh, talking about how it’s not the women who are in “cricket court.”

My ears perk up, and I scribble something down that I wanted to delve into anyway: disciplinary action in cricket. Every sport has a code of conduct, and most often, it is brought back up after an incident that needs addressing. I’m talking, kindly, about things like male cricket players losing their tempers and getting into fights on the pitch. 

In November of 2025, the NZ Herald reported on a social cricket game that quickly turned violent, with players smashing cricket bats into each other after a disagreement with an umpire’s call. Cricket Wellington had to contact the clubs involved to find out exactly what had happened and know how to proceed. 

It’s interesting to see the contrast in the frequency of disciplinary processes involving men and women in sport—especially when women are so often the ones accused of being too emotional, too dramatic, or too difficult to manage. 

“Most of the time you have two umpires, but sometimes they don’t have enough so they [only] send one,” James says. “The women’s team mostly gets one umpire, but the men’s teams always need two… because they’re mean to the umpires.” 

Who are we calling hysterical? 

It feels to me like the reason men in sport need more resources is because they need babysitting. What’s up with that? 

“Whenever the women’s team bowls a wide, the reaction is always, ‘they must be shit’, " James says. “And then if a guy bowls a wide, it’s all ‘oh my goodness, they’re bowling so fast… it’s okay, they’ll get the next one.’” 

It all feels like protecting the men’s feelings, making sure none of them are hurt on or off the cricket pitch. You don’t get the same level of care for the women’s teams, so you’ll have to forgive me for being a bit callous here. 

“At the moment, when we're playing outdoor cricket, men and women’s teams play at the same time. But the men’s teams tend to get covers before us.” 

Covers are the tarpaulins put over the pitch when it rains. It’s not really something that should be gendered, but maybe something that a “better” team would get priority for. Do the men’s teams get first pick because they’re the better, or because they’re used to a little more princess treatment than everyone else? 

“Once I asked, ‘where are the covers, the pitch is so wet’,” James says. “And they told me the Premier Reserves took them. And I was like, ‘why did the Premier Reserves take them, they’re below us?’”

“It just feels like they get priority,” she says. “Each club gets a home ground, and if you’re in the top team, you’re more likely to have access to the top pitch. The men’s team got that pitch for six weekends, and we got it once.” 

I sit with this for a second. I mean if it’s for top teams… maybe the men’s team was just better? 

“Well, no,” James says. “They actually got dropped down a grade.” 

It would be one thing if this was just about covers, or pitches, or how many umpires get sent to a game. But the smaller inequities start to add up, and eventually they reveal something bigger: women’s teams are constantly asked to prove they deserve the basics, while men’s teams are handed them as standard. 

That attitude does not stay in the scheduling spreadsheet or the gear shed. It follows women into the clubrooms, onto the pitch, and into the way male players feel entitled to speak to them. 

A male cricketer once walked up to James out of the blue to say, “You guys are shit.” He was referring to the female players who were in the World Cup team, preparing to represent New Zealand. 

How much more can female athletes do to ensure a safe and even playing field for themselves? Even when they’re doing better than the men? 

That’s the most exhausting. After training longer, working harder, accepting that the conditions are worse than your male peers—after all of that, they must smile politely and be civil when questioned whether they belong there at all. 

They do belong there. They have always belonged there. The problem is not that women’s sport needs to prove itself worthy of respect. The problem is that respect is still being treated like something women have to earn, medal by medal, headline by headline, while men are handed it before they even walk onto the field.