Opinion | Women’s Rugby World Cup renamed to gender-neutral title, in move likely to cause confusion
- The sentiment may be correct but the execution is bizarre given there is an obvious alternative as World Rugby takes another step towards equality
There is only one kind of rugby union. All who play it are taking part in the same sport. That’s why it’s high time we stop referring to it as if it was two separate things: rugby and women’s rugby.
When does women’s sport just become sport? The semantics of keeping the gendered specificity creates a process sociologists call “othering”. It means one is the norm – rugby – and the other is, well, the other – women’s rugby. For many, the difference might seem arbitrary, but it is just one jigsaw piece in the massive mosaic of gender norms that keep women “in their place”.
So, when World Rugby announced it would be dropping the “Women’s” from Women’s Rugby World Cup their sentiment was spot on. The governing body has taken a “landmark moment and a statement that we are treating the men’s and women’s games evenly and the potential in each is as powerful as the other,” said Brett Gosper, World Rugby’s chief executive, and he’s right.
The only thing is, it is a bit confusing. We now have two Rugby World Cups. They don’t clash in terms of scheduling as they are on different four-year cycles – the (men’s) Rugby World Cup is in 2019 and the (women’s) Rugby World Cup is 2021. But as World Rugby is desperate to grow the sport beyond its traditional heartlands, it would help if we made the tournaments as easy as possible for the casual fan to follow and type into search engines.
It would have been very simple to add “Men’s” to the men’s Rugby World Cup. It differentiates the two and removes the issue of othering by giving them equal weight. As one pundit, Nick Heath, pointed out on Twitter, the tournament name is likely to just change from Women’s to women’s – not much progress there.