IW #243: See Us As We Are (Lewes FC)

This excerpt is from the Invisible Women Newsletter. Click here to join the 50k+ subscribers and read the full article.

For this week’s newsletter, I went to visit Lewes FC, a community-owned women’s football team who, in 2017, became “the first professional or semi-professional football club to pay its women’s team the same as its men’s team and to give them equal resources.”

As I wrote, “As well as being the first club to equalise pay and resources between their male and female teams Lewes FC (or, as they call themselves, The Rooks) are also fully fan-owned (anyone can become an owner) and have a strong ethos of giving back to their community. One of their male team members set up what is now a thriving community garden (Player of the Match gets whatever is in season); they don’t take sponsorship from gambling companies; they have designated breastfeeding stations (no need to feed in the toilets at the Dripping Pan) they have a pretty amazing enormous statue of a couple of lesbian pirates overlooking their new fancy pitch — they won a grant from the Premier League Stadium Fund to install the pitch thanks to their pioneering work on pushing women’s football forward. And of course the new pitch benefited the men’s team too. It’s almost like, with equality everyone wins?

The whole team also benefited in other ways from the 2017 decision to focus on equality. “Since making this move,” their website explains, “our attendances have increased, Owner numbers have increased, sponsorships have increased and media coverage has sky-rocketed. Turns out that ‘different’ works. And this kind of different will work in other clubs and other industries. That’s the power of equality.”

You can read the story of my trip here and also read the Sussex World coverage of my visit.