Melbourne Cup winning jockey Michelle Payne broke all the rules at Flemington yesterday.
The first rule is women aren’t meant to be at Flemington at all except as eye candy or service staff. Well, what’s the point of women except as something to look at or someone to bring you another champers? (Exceptions to this rule are the occasional woman trainer – gently tolerated as oddities – and the race mares themselves, as long as they’re winning and because they’re needed as breeding machines after retirement.)
The second rule is women certainly aren’t meant to utter the word “chauvinist” during their winner’s speech, and definitely must not tell the majority of race owners and trainers that they can “get stuffed” for not believing in the talent of women. Michelle did both. The hallowed, male-dominated halls of Flemington shook gently with testosterone-fuelled angst.
The third rule, and the most important, is only small people who also possess male genitalia are permitted to ride the Cup winning horse. Apparently even some of the owners of the winning horse believed this rule as, according to Michelle, she only held onto the ride with difficulty.
Whether you believe horse racing is dressed-up animal cruelty or the noble sport of kings, Michelle’s ride and victory were stirring stuff. That she used her platform to highlight the endemic misogyny facing women jockeys added yet another reason to admire Michelle.
Yet just to get to ride in a Melbourne Cup is in itself a testament to the astounding character Michelle must have. Why? Because she knew – as every woman working in a male-dominated field knows – that she’s judged as a representative of her entire gender every time she mounts her horse on race day.
Michelle is the person in the spotlight right now, but this issue is about all women, especially sports women, and most particularly those in traditionally male fields. For example, when David Reynolds called the all-female race driver team at Bathurst a “Pussy Wagon” recently, he turned the two women in that car into nothing more than vaginas in race suits. And when their car crashed during the race, men on social media everywhere blamed the young driver, Renee Gracie. Yet her crash was virtually blameless (she skidded on oil dropped by another car) and the 10 or more crashes caused by male drivers on the same day resulted in not a single reference to their gender as contributing to their lack of ability to keep their car in one piece.
The reason for this is that men are seen as the default gender, so their accomplishments and failures are noteworthy only for the facts and not for the configuration of their chromosomes. But women aren’t the default gender, and are thus seen as “the other”. Therefore, their accomplishments are only seen through the prism of them also being female. The “female” part then informs every other decision made about them.
For example, on ABC’s “The Drum” just after Michelle’s win yesterday, fellow woman jockey Casey Bruce was asked why there are so few women jockeys at the top. She claimed women jockeys who make a mistake on a horse are quickly replaced by a man, on the basis that (of course) women jockeys just don’t cut the mustard. Yet a male jockey making a mistake is just a person making a mistake, and future decisions about his ability will be made on the basis of all evidence about him without any consideration of the relevance of his gender.
This means the personal pressures on men are lower, as they’re able to perform as individuals and have the comfort of knowing they’ll be judged purely on merit. They’ll be given second (and third, and maybe fourth) chances, which will increase their competence, because competence comes partly from learning through mistakes. If women are sacked after their first or second mistake, how will they ever become champions?
In the end, the way people think about women becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Believe in women and they’ll prove they can do it. Believe they’re “lesser”, and they’ll prove you right there, too, because you’ve set them up to fail and made sure they did.
The challenge here is to the men (and women) who have the ability to either support or refuse support to women on the way up. Especially, since we’re talking about horse racing here, those in racing with the responsibility to either dismiss or promote women.
Please don’t let Michelle’s win be a one-off. Give other women in racing a chance. Let’s see a quarter or a third or (heaven forbid) half of future racing fields comprised of women jockeys.
From now on – and thanks to Michelle Payne – we’re watching, and we want more women.
Enough is enough.