The Matilda Effect

The Matilda Effect is the exciting, inspiring, sometimes infuriating and always colourful story of the Australian women's football (soccer) team, the Matildas, and their ultimately successful struggle, alongside other women from around the world, to compete in World Cup football. From the 1980s, when women had to pay to participate in the pilot Women's World Cup, to 2019, when the principle of equal pay for women players was finally accepted amid surging interest in their game, the voices of key figures emerge. A book at once about and not about sport, and with a throughline of human rights and gender equality history, The Matilda Effect takes the reader out of the stands and onto the pitch, into the team's hotels, buses, boardrooms and social media universe, where positive change has been wrestled into being.

Fiona Crawford is a writer, editor and researcher whose work spans social and environmental issues, the arts and football and has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Big Issue and The Conversation among others. She is an adjunct lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology's Centre for Justice and co-authored a book, Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women's Football.