IT’S official, we are in a golden age of women’s sport – and quite frankly I’m thrilled.
This summer it’s been impossible to miss our girls triumphing in cricket, rugby, football, tennis and athletics.
Our female cricketers won the Women’s World Cup, reached the semi-finals of the football Euros and won two relay silver medals at the athletics World Championships, while Johanna Konta became the first British woman in the Wimbledon semis since 1978.
Meanwhile, our rugby world champs are set to defend their title this weekend and the hockey team are into the World League semi-finals.
It comes just a year after the Rio Olympics, in which our women were once again on a gold rush.
Nicola Adams became the first British boxer to retain an Olympic title for 92 years, winning gold in the women’s flyweight final, cyclist Laura Kenny got two gold medals and our women’s hockey team won their first Olympic gold in a dramatic penalty shoot-out.
All of these are incredible achievements — but I can’t help thinking that if they’d been men, there would have been a much bigger hoo-ha.
Women just don’t seem to get showered with the same levels of money and praise as the men, yet in many cases they work harder and behave better than the blokes do.
Female sports stars should be paid the same as their male counterparts.
Our female teams aren’t just brilliant sportswomen, they’re also role models who demonstrate the values of teamwork, courage and hard work every time they step out on the pitch or track.
When Jessica Ennis-Hill missed out on the heptathlon title at the World Championships in 2011 you didn’t see her throw her toys out of the pram — unlike some of our male sports stars.
Even our beloved David Beckham, who kicked out at Argentina captain Diego Simeone and was shown a red card at the 1998 World Cup, was not immune from flashes of childish temper.
And when Dame Jess stood on that podium recently and was given the gold medal after Russian heptathlete Tatyana Chernova was stripped of it for being a drugs cheat, she took it with good grace.
She didn’t crow about how she should have won it in the first place.
And it’s not just on the track or pitch where these female sports stars can teach us a thing or two. Try to recall the last time you saw one falling out of a nightclub, or heard of one cheating on their spouse.
I bet you can’t. But when it comes to the men . . . take your pick.
These female athletes also send a message to girls that strong, not skinny, is sexy. Forget reality TV stars — these are the women that the younger generation should be looking up to.
I salute Sport England’s campaign, This Girl Can, for celebrating real women exercising, no matter how they look.
It got 250,000 more women into sport since its launch three years ago.
And I couldn’t agree more with This Girl Can’s fantastic slogan, “Sweating like a pig, feeling like a fox”.
Wake up, women, it’s OK to sweat.
So find a sport you love and get out there. It’s fantastic to know that the number of women doing sport regularly in
England is at an all-time high of 7.21 million. But there are still two million more men exercising or playing regular sport and we need to tackle this gap.
Our girl power heroes show that with hard graft, determination and a whole lot of guts, women can achieve anything they set their minds to.
They are true role models who I hope will inspire more and more women to have a go at sport themselves.
- Baroness Karren Brady is a Sun columnist and vice chairman of West Ham FC, which this year took the day-to-day running of its women’s team in-house.
