Louise Burrows has been playing professional rugby union for the Brumbies for 27 years.
The 44-year-old is the club's longest active player — she started playing rugby for the ACT in 1995, a year before the Brumbies club was even formed — and she has represented Australia in four Ruby World Cups.
Yet she isn't paid a cent for her sporting prowess, and the mother-of-two has to work full-time as a physical education teacher at a Canberra school to pay her own way in the sport.
"I feel like the game is coming along and we are all so grateful, we really are," she said.
"But the amount of time and dedication that we devote to our sport and to not get paid, sometimes it does make it really challenging.
In stark contrast, her fellow male Brumbies players are paid a full-time wage, with some receiving six-figure salaries.
They do not have to work full-time to pay their own way nor cover the costs of extras like massage and physiotherapy.
And while Burrows stresses she is "not ungrateful" for the opportunities she has been given, she is well aware of the disparity and the need for change.
"I'm not expecting $80,000 a year," she said.
"But to think that the NRL W girls are on $8,000 minimum wage for their short season — that blows my mind.
"Even if we got that, it would be amazing, really it would be."
Players left out of pocket
The sheer love of the game it what drives some of the Brumbies Super W players to go to great lengths to play the sport.
Six of the players live in regional NSW and four live in Sydney. They travel hours to Canberra for training sessions, with some not returning home until well after midnight.
The team's captain, Rebecca Smyth, is one of those players. The mother of four travels 4.5 hours from Narromine to Canberra twice a week for training, costing her hundreds of dollars in extra petrol.
The Brumbies supply their Super W players with uniforms and pay travel costs to interstate matches, but that is where the reimbursements end.
"I'll book in for a massage and it'll cost at least $100, but it's [essential] to get through the season," Burrows said.
"But some girls can't afford that so, therefore, some of them are getting injured or getting niggles because they can't afford those little things that the men just get, it's just part of their training day."
Two Super W teams start paying players
Last week the Western Force announced it would follow the Melbourne Rebels' lead in paying their Super W players.
The remuneration is still a far cry from the wages that the male players receive, but some would consider it a good start.
The Brumbies say paying their female players is something the club is aiming to do in the future, but that they are not currently in a financial position to do so.
Burrows' is hopeful the women's team will continue to draw growing crowds, with the first game of the season on Saturday being broadcast on both pay and free-to-air television.
"If we can get more people coming to the games, more people tuning in to watch us play, then hopefully the sponsors will realise that they want to sponsor us and be seen as supporting women in sport," she said.
But Sports Integrity Research Lead at the University of Canberra, Catherine Ordway, said equality on the playing field should not have to be tied to crowd and viewing numbers.
"You can always do it if you want to, and we've seen that in some round-ball football clubs where they've made a concerted and conscious effort to fund the women's side of the game," she said.
"They've changed things and made sure that there's equal pay and some of the men's teams have said that they will take a pay cut."
Assistant Professor Ordway said repetitive excuses from sporting organisations like "men and women don't want to watch women play sport" or "girls don't want to play sport" have been disproved time and time again.
"You don't have to look far, we've got the great example of the women's cricket at the MCG that broke the record with 86,000 people there," she said.
"And then we've got examples across the Olympics where it's the women's sports that break all the records in terms of viewer eyeballs."
In the ACT, Assistant Professor Ordway said the Canberra Capitals, Canberra Meteors and Canberra United were great examples of how successful women's teams could be when they were adequately supported.
Although, the Capitals have been left without a venue for their finals games this season.
"Put the resources in and you'll have a women's team that will draw the same crowds and draw the same sponsorship and draw the same eyeballs in terms of broadcasting rights," she said.
'Enormous amount to be done'
Assistant Professor Ordway said equality on the playing field was not just about pay, but also respect, support and opportunities.
She said sporting clubs could do simple things like having the same induction ceremonies, equal access to gyms and physiotherapists, and sharing prime training times.
Increasing the media coverage of women's sports and having more women in leadership roles were wider changes that Assistant Professor Ordway said would also make a big difference.
"We're supposed to get excited about 24 per cent of women in leadership positions in the national sporting organisations," she said.
"It's a joke. It's been like that for 10 or more years … that's despite all the efforts about getting more women into leadership positions and all the coaching and training they do for women.
On the eve of International Women's Day, Assistant Professor Ordway highlighted the many great things to celebrate in women's sport, but she noted there was still "an enormous amount to be done" to achieve an equal playing field for women in Australia.
"There are people who will say that we've come a long way, but we really haven't, when you look at some countries around the world that are doing it much better for their women's teams than we are," she said.
"I think we can do a lot more than we are."
