Adopting gender neutral sporting terminology is a no-brainer

These things take time, but similar steps have happened in football. The “linesman” (or woman) became the “assistant referee” way back in 1996. Though this was to better reflect the function of the role, and some pundits still refer to the outdated term, it still made a point of dropping the gender specificity associated with the position. Though it remains a largely male space, more women are making their way into refereeing and language does have a small part to play in changing perceptions.

There are more examples in football that are ingrained in our vocabulary, which could well fall out of usage in years to come. “Man of the match” and “man-marking” remain commonly used phrases, and even in a Women’s Super League match you will often hear players shout “man on”.

“Seeing men as the human default is fundamental to the structure of human society,” Caroline Criado Perez wrote in her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

As historically male-dominated, sport – and the terms and roles we associate with it – have fallen in line with this same skewed perception. This can extend to highlighting female differences in sport, too. In tennis, it was only two years ago that Wimbledon finally opted to drop the tradition whereby the umpire referred to female players as “Miss” or “Mrs”.

The men are referred to only by surname, but “Game, Mrs Williams” was called by the umpire in 2018, after Serena Williams married her husband Alexis Ohanian but opted to keep her maiden name. Referring to the marital status of the most well-known woman on the tour highlighted the tradition’s irrelevance enough to nip it in the bud the following year.

In Finland, they took this gender neutrality a step further in 2020, by renaming their women’s top domestic football division simply “National League”. In making no reference to their players’ gender, it deviated from the norm across Europe, where the English, French, German and Spanish top leagues all feature female prefixes in their titles. “It is common to talk about sports and women’s sports as if the latter would be less worthy,” Heidi Pihlaja, the Finnish association’s head of women’s football development, said at the time. “Football is football – no matter who kicks the ball.”

It could be the direction for things to come, if a somewhat confusing one should gender references be dropped entirely. Perhaps more likely will be that the “men” prefix is added to teams and tournaments as the profile of women’s sports grows. Though not neutral, it would deviate from the practice which sees men’s sides remain as the default across the media and even within teams.

On some major football club websites, for example, team drop-down menus list “first team”, “under-23s”, “under-18s” and “women”. Even the way search engines are set up defaults to men in sport.

A search for “Chelsea football club”, for example, assumes you are looking for the men’s team, unless you specifically say otherwise, the obvious reason for this being the historically much larger profile of the men’s side of the sport.

It is why the Hundred offers a clean slate in this respect. All the franchises have a male and female team, all will be launching in the same year and given a largely equal profile from the off. The theory goes that that will mean the men’s and women’s sides will be referred to as such.

While “outs” have been dropped because of the outcry, simply calling players what they are – bowlers and batters – seems a no-brainer.