The wage will increase in The Hundred girls’s competitors are a “step in the appropriate course” with room to “maintain 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 mentioned 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, mentioned 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 unfavourable views, I believe it is nice,” mentioned Cross.
“My factor is that we simply maintain placing cash within the pockets of the identical gamers that maintain 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 have been luring these gamers over anyway.
“It is simply acquired to maintain entering into the appropriate 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 an enormous distinction.
“Hopefully, we are able to simply maintain these little wins and maintain chipping away.”
In 2023, the entire gamers within the high wage bracket have 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 common yearly wage for a girls’s regional cricketer is £25,000. A few of those that play in The Hundred however are with no home contract are nonetheless in training or produce other jobs.
“Once 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 are having to take break day work and all kinds to play, are in a position to earn a bit more cash.
“The headline is ‘how good is it that ladies at the moment are incomes this?’ – however it’s really solely two gamers per workforce.”