The wage will increase in The Hundred girls’s competitors are a “step in the proper course” with room to “preserve chipping away” at enhancements, says Kate Cross.
England bowler Cross was within the high bracket for runners-up Northern Superchargers final season.
“It’s clearly unbelievable,” Cross stated on the BBC’s No Balls podcast.
“£50,000 to play home girls’s cricket within the UK is mad. It’s considerably greater than the underside paid males’s participant now too.”
Within the first yr of The Hundred in 2021, the highest girls’s gamers earned £15,000 whereas the lowest-paid males’s gamers earned £30,000.
However Cross and No Balls co-host Alex Hartley, who performed for Welsh Hearth earlier than retiring on the finish of final yr’s match, stated there are nonetheless areas for enchancment across the lowest-paid girls’s gamers, whose pay has elevated from £7,500 to £8,000.
“Earlier than anybody comes at me with destructive views, I believe it is nice,” stated Cross.
“My factor is that we simply preserve placing cash within the pockets of the identical gamers that preserve getting cash put into their pockets.
“I am certain at some stage there would have been a dialogue round a desk on the ECB [England and Wales Cricket Board] and that they should lure gamers over with cash, however they had been luring these gamers over anyway.
“It is simply bought to maintain getting into the proper course and it’s. The boys’s wage is capped however £8,000 for the ladies’s lowest-paid participant, when the boys’s is getting £30,000, is a giant distinction.
“Hopefully, we will simply preserve these little wins and preserve chipping away.”
In 2023, all the gamers within the high wage bracket had been both abroad gamers or England internationals.
Girls’s cricket’s home set-up just isn’t totally skilled, with 80 gamers contracted by their regional groups and 18 gamers on full England central contracts.
The typical yearly wage for a girls’s regional cricketer is £25,000. A few of those that play in The Hundred however are with out a home contract are nonetheless in training or produce other jobs.
“After I noticed that the underside one is £8,000 now, I believed absolutely the highest one may go as much as perhaps £40,000 and also you filter it down,” Hartley added.
“Then the gamers within the backside bracket and the women which might be having to take time without work work and all types to play, are capable of earn a bit more cash.
“The headline is ‘how good is it that ladies are actually incomes this?’ – however it’s truly solely two gamers per staff.”
