This past week has marked five years since the first AFLW game was played. It is still far too easy to identify cracks in the league, including a lack of representation, a truncated season and an ongoing pursuit of pay parity. Equally, though, looking back also serves as a way of counting blessings. In five years, all AFL clubs now have a women’s side. The AFLW has gone from being a largely symbolic league moulded in the shape of the men’s competition to a very distinct and strategic offering for the AFL. Women and girls have signed up to play football in droves.
The more remarkable story is what AFLW has come to represent. One cannot underestimate the relationship between women’s sport – and the AFLW specifically – and the rise of gender equity in this country. Thinking back to the lock-out crowd at that inaugural game in 2017, the statement being made by the more than 24,500 people who turned up to watch Carlton v Collingwood, was clear. It was time for women to come to the fore in new and exciting ways. If crowd numbers at subsequent games are an indication, many of the people at Ikon Park that night were not necessarily women’s football fans. Regardless, they flocked to the game, the atmosphere of which felt more like a summer ‘sit-in’ than a game of football. Everyone wanted to be there and make visible their support of what to many seemed like the start of a new herstory.
