For decades, the calendar of cricket arranged the women’s game around the men’s — slotted into shoulder windows, hosted on secondary grounds, broadcast where the schedule allowed. That arrangement has been quietly shifting, and this June it inverts more visibly than at almost any point in the sport’s history.
The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup arrives in England on June 12 and runs through July 5, with the final at Lord’s. Later in the summer, the same ground will host the first women’s Test ever played there. Two markers, one competitive and one symbolic, on cricket’s most iconic stage.
The commercial scaffolding beneath all of this did not appear overnight. India’s home triumph at the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup in 2025 propelled the women’s game to new commercial heights, validating both the audience and the economics in cricket’s largest market. The growth has been compounded by a maturing franchise ecosystem — the Women’s Premier League in India, The Hundred in England, the Women’s Big Bash League in Australia, and the Women’s Caribbean Premier League — which has steadily expanded broadcast inventory, sponsorship interest, and revenue depth behind the women’s game over the past several years. That commercial momentum is the backdrop against which this summer’s institutional movement is now unfolding.
The deeper story this June, though, sits off the field — in the offices, boards, and governance structures where the modern game is actually run. Across that terrain, women’s cricket is seeing the clearest concentration of senior appointments ever, and the convergence of on-field spotlight with off-field movement is what makes this particular summer worth marking.
At the global level, Dr. Ros Rivaz joined the ICC Board this week as Independent Director, a seat that had stood vacant for two years. Sarah Keane became the first full-time female Chief Executive Officer of a Full Member national governing body when she took the role at Cricket Ireland earlier this year — a structural first after multiple women had held a CEO position only on an interim basis. Among those who had held such a role provisionally was Clare Connor, whose stretch as interim Chief Executive Officer of the England and Wales Cricket Board followed her landmark service, five years ago this fall, as the first female President of the Marylebone Cricket Club in the institution’s 238-year history.
The pattern extends across the institutional pyramid. Women now chair Full Member boards in South Africa (Pearl Maphoshe) and New Zealand (Diana Puketapu-Lyndon, the first woman in that role at NZC), with Dr. Vanessa Guthrie serving as Deputy Chair of Cricket Australia. At the state level in Australia, Avril Fahey became the first woman to chair the Western Australian Cricket Association — and the first to chair any Australian state cricket board — serving as full-time Chair from December 2022 to April 2025. In English domestic cricket, Leicestershire (Emma White) is led by a female Chief Executive Officer, and Warwickshire (Tracey Orr) and Lancashire (Dame Sarah Storey) have newly appointed women chairs.
In franchise cricket, the IPL ecosystem includes multiple women in senior ownership and executive roles. In the players’ space, women are central to the global athlete representation and player rights movement now reshaping how cricketers organize and bargain. And among the Associate nations — where Kenya’s Jackie Janmohamed broke the first ceiling in 2018 as the first woman Chief Executive Officer of any cricket governing board — Trudy Lindblade now leads Cricket Scotland and Sarah Gomersall heads Jersey Cricket.
Beyond formal governance, women hold senior leadership positions throughout the broader cricket ecosystem — across media and broadcast, commercial and sponsorship, marketing, legal, event management, player representation, and the agency business — running much of the operating layer the modern sport depends on. The visibility of the boardroom appointments matters, but the breadth of the underlying picture matters at least as much.
Even the sport’s language has moved. It has been exactly five years since “batter” officially replaced “batsman” in cricket’s laws — a small change in lexicon, but a massive one in terms of the standing of women in the game.
Many of these firsts are recent, hard-won, and genuinely worth celebrating. But the fact that several of them are firsts at all — and some as recently as 2026 — invites harder questions. In a sport played, watched, and now substantially funded by women, those dates are not only milestones; they are a record of how long the door stayed shut. Recognising the progress and asking why it took this long are not in tension. They are the same conversation.
None of this constitutes arrival. Progress remains uneven across geographies, formats, and institutional layers. Pay gaps persist. Pipeline gaps persist. The path from grassroots cricket through coaching and into administration still narrows sharply for women in much of the cricketing world.
The point of marking the milestones is not to declare the work done. The destination is a sport in which gender no longer determines opportunity or advancement — where the appointments above would not be remarkable because they would not be unusual. Until then, the work is to make the trajectory visible, to normalize rather than exceptionalize women occupying senior decision-making roles, and to maintain pressure on the parts of the industry that have not yet moved.
Despite all this, the overarching imperative is one of celebration. We want to honor the progress that has been made, especially off the pitch, and the inspiring individuals driving it.
Thus throughout June, cricexec will spotlight the executives, administrators, and operators reshaping the industry, examine the issues and impediments still in their path, and bring forward conversations with leaders across the global game.
Later in the month, on June 29, we will launch a major cricexec initiative designed to bring more of these stories and leaders into clearer view. More to follow.
