Women's Cricket in the 2020s: The Rise of a Global Game

The Breakthrough Moment: MCG 2020

March 8, 2020. International Women's Day. Australia vs India in the ICC Women's T20 World Cup Final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The attendance: 86,174 — the largest crowd for a women's cricket match in history and the largest crowd for any women's sporting event in Australia. India had beaten Australia in the group stage; Shafali Verma's explosive opening had announced a new generation. Australia won the final, with Alyssa Healy making 75 and Beth Mooney's 78*. But the crowd, the broadcast reach (500 million+ viewers globally), and the event itself represented a turning point that administrators had argued was coming for a decade. Women's cricket was now a commercial product capable of filling the world's largest cricket venues.

The Growth of Women's IPL and Franchise Cricket

The Women's Premier League — the women's equivalent of the IPL — launched in March 2023. The franchise auction generated ₹4,669 crore in media rights across five years; the five team franchises sold for a combined ₹4,669 crore. Mumbai Indians won the inaugural edition; Delhi Capitals won in 2024. Smriti Mandhana of Royal Challengers Bangalore became the highest-paid women's cricketer, with combined salary and endorsements exceeding ₹3 crore per season. The WPL's existence created the next pressure: international cricket boards who had provided no professional contracts to women's players were now seeing their best players leave for franchise leagues. The ECB, Cricket Australia, and BCCI all accelerated women's contracts in response.

Ellyse Perry, Healy, and Australia's Dominance

Australia were the dominant team in women's cricket throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s — winning the T20 World Cup in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2020, and 2023. Their squad depth, domestic competition structure (Women's Big Bash League, established 2015), and centralised contracts gave them an infrastructure advantage over every other board. Ellyse Perry combined Test and ODI batting of the highest quality (Test average 65+) with international-standard medium-fast bowling. Alyssa Healy as a wicketkeeper-opener was perhaps the most valuable white-ball women's cricketer of the era. The challenge from India — Mithali Raj's batting consistency, Jhulan Goswami's 255 ODI wickets before retirement in 2022 — and England's Heather Knight captaincy era have closed the gap significantly.

England's Women's Ashes and the Pay Gap Debate

The Women's Ashes series — played across Tests, ODIs, and T20Is in a multi-format structure — grew into cricket's most watched women's bilateral series. England's 2023 Women's Ashes at home attracted record television audiences on BBC and Sky. The pay gap issue, however, remained prominent: leading English women players earned significantly less than equivalent men's players despite similar television audiences for major matches. The PCA (Professional Cricketers' Association) and international player bodies pushed consistently for parity; the ECB increased women's central contracts from 18 to 24 in 2023 and continued expanding. The trajectory suggested structural pay parity within the decade.

The Path Forward

By 2025, women's cricket had achieved what had seemed impossible a decade earlier: genuine commercial viability and viewer engagement at scale. The WPL, WBBL, Hundred (women's), The Hundred (Caribbean Premier League women's equivalent), and growing franchise leagues in South Africa and New Zealand provided year-round professional competition. India's talent pipeline — emerging from district-level competition for the first time via BCCI investment from 2017 onward — was producing batswomen of international quality in unprecedented numbers. Shafali Verma, Smriti Mandhana, and Deepti Sharma represented a generation that grew up watching women's cricket as a viable career. The 2030 Women's World Cup — expected to draw television audiences comparable to the men's equivalent — was already being cited as the game's next transformative milestone.