A little over a month ago the Australian Women’s National Football team, the “Matildas”, went on strike over a wage and conditions dispute with the Football Federation of Australia (FFA). It seemed astounding that an Australian sporting team, in 2015, was being paid below the minimum wage and yet perform at the level of professional athletes. Commentary in the media seemed, as it so often does, to focus on a few narrow issues. Whilst the issues were not superficial, they did not really reach the fundamental nature of the problem.

Many commentators were, quite rightly, surprised that the Matildas pay and working conditions paled in comparison to the men’s team. How could professional athletes be expected to train several times a week, go on long tours to foreign countries and yet not be paid a liveable wage? The difference in payment between the Matildas and the Socceroos is hard to ignore yet unsurprising. The women’s game probably, and I have not been able to get hard figures, raises less revenue than the men’s game. There is less money to go around. This seems a safe inference to make, putting aside any perfectly valid arguments about the efficient use of the available revenues.

Another argument in the commentariat has been the one from desert. The Matildas deserve better pay simply because they perform better than their male counterparts. They win more games, more tournaments and as such are more competitive. It seems when viewed as a pure workplace issue, the Matildas are being underpaid for overperforming. Once again, there is little that can be said in response. Perhaps one can return to the earlier response that with less revenue available, either through sponsorships and broadcasting rights, the Matildas should be paid less than the Socceroos because they raise less revenue for the FFA.

But I believe the fundamental problem is that we tend to ignore the affect of social behaviours and what the philosopher Iris Marion Young calls “structural injustice”. This problem is ignored because we ignore the private enterprise nature of professional sports in Australia. Professional athletes operate in a open marketplace just like any other worker. And so the fundamental question to ask is why the Matildas have such poor conditions in a free labour market? There is no inequality in law or otherwise in the freedom of female soccer players to pursue their athletic careers or any other career. There is no inequality in opportunity for female soccer players either. They have the same chance as any other woman or man to either play soccer at a professional level or pursue other more gainful work. The injustice that jumps out at us is more subtle and so less discussed. Nevertheless to my mind the diagnosis is simple, it is what Young called “structural injustice”, or injustice outside the framework of our basic social institutions.

The Matildas, much like other work primarily done by women, has historically been valued less than men’s work. No doubt our values have changed and this is increasingly become less true, but the Matildas’s circumstance highlights an acute case where Young’s phenomenon of structural injustice is clearly on display yet altogether ignored. The Matildas have poor working conditions precisely because the social behaviours that dictate the fluctuations in the labour market, the advertising market and consumer goods markets value the men’s game more than the women’s game. The important point to notice here is that the Matildas are not being discriminated against by any one individual or any one institution. They are affected by the network of behaviours we exhibit. We choose to ignore women’s sport, the little that is broadcast, and we choose to put less money behind our purchase of goods that women exclusively might use, which would be prime candidates for advertising during women’s soccer matches.

If we accept this analysis the challenge that presents itself is to work out the just way to redress the injustice. There seems no clear liberal answer to such a problem. It seems illiberal to coercively change what people value. One approach to a solution, that I will not fully argue for here, is that we should look more closely at how our institutional arrangements hold us responsible for the choices we make. Perhaps we should be held responsible, either in practical measures, or in argument, for valuing men playing sport more than women playing sport. At the very least this would require a broader understanding of how women cannot always choose the choices open to them in liberal societies.