This week, the whole world focuses more than usual on women’s rights as we celebrate the International Women’s Day tomorrow. On Local Matters, we take this as an opportunity to focus on gender equality in sports. In the most popular sports, the men’s competitions are still the more prestigious, men get paid more, receive more important sponsoring and reach a larger audience than the women’s. In professional football, men’s salaries are around ten times higher than women’s. Only slowly, this has been changing, and women’s sports has become more attractive. More than 87.000 fans filled up the ranks at the final match of the women’s European football championships in London last year, more than ever before at a women’s match. While equality in sports, progresses very slowly on the international stage, in local sports, this is much easier to achieve.

The municipal council of Esch last week unanimously approved a Charter for equality between men and women in sports. Esch is the first commune in Luxembourg to put gender inequality in sports on the agenda. Unfortunately, the municipality was not yet available to give us more details about this document and what it entails. Instead, we went to the Escher Volleyball Club to ask the women’s team how they fell about equality of women and men in volleyball.