Counties hosting professional women’s teams will be strictly monitored to ensure the England and Wales Cricket Board’s multi-million pound investment is used to achieve gender equality, Beth Barrett has warned – Wild, director of women’s professional football at the ECB.
If counties fail to create an equitable environment, they risk having their funding withdrawn.
A new national survey of female players and staff is being introduced to encourage whistleblowing as the ECB seeks to ensure the £1.5m provided to 10 of the premier nations is invested appropriately .
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Eight counties – Durham, Essex, Hampshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Somerset, Surrey and Warwickshire – have won the right to host professional first-tier women’s teams next season following a bidding process earlier this year, while two additional teams will join the top tier in 2026 (Yorkshire) and 2027 (Glamorgan).
Other sports have struggled to ensure funds for female players are properly earmarked – the 2023 Carney Review found that money for women’s football was in practice often diverted to men’s football – and there were concerns that the ECB is struggling to hold blue-chip counties accountable for the promises made in their winning bids.
But the new County Partnership Agreement (CPA), which comes into force on February 1, 2025, will give the ECB unprecedented leverage over how counties treat women.
“It’s not just about giving them a big check,” Barrett-Wild said. “The funding is reserved for the women’s program, and we will monitor its monitoring. I will know how every pound is spent. If this went wrong, it would trigger a non-compliance event and we would have the option to withdraw or suspend funding.
Women’s football would be a “key agenda item” in the county’s partnership review process, Barrett-Wild added, and that all aspects of county activity would be audited to ensure equal treatment women’s and men’s teams.
“For Tier 1 counties, the way they will manage and present their men’s team will be exactly the same as the way they will manage and present their women’s team,” Barrett-Wild said. “The standard of facilities in which the women’s team will play must be the same. They must offer equal levels of coverage across [marketing] channels to their men’s team and women’s team.
“The new survey of women’s players and staff will give us a really good insight into those Tier 1 and Tier 2 locker rooms in terms of how it’s happening on the pitch.”
A new player movement framework will allow players to move between Tier 1 (professional), Tier 2 (semi-professional) and Tier 3 (recreational) counties via a loan system, although anyone moving to level 1 must have a contract in place.
Meanwhile, England’s players are expected to be available for the opening weeks of the Women’s Metro Bank One-Day Cup in May as well as the first final day of the Women’s Vitality Blast on July 27. “We’ve tried to look at the national women’s calendar and the English women’s calendar to make sure there are those opportunities.”
Barrett-Wild described England’s early exit from the T20 World Cup at the hands of the West Indies as “disappointing”, but she was confident changes to the domestic structure would help address the lack of depth in English women’s cricket.
“It pushes me to want to create this surplus of talent, so that there is real competition for places,” she said. “I think we will start to see that. There will be some growing pains during this initial phase of implementation. Not everything will be perfect in 2025, but we will have a lot more depth by 2028.”