The UCI announced this week that for the first time in five years, some professional cyclists are getting a pay raise. The minimum salary for men will rise to €38,115 for WorldTour teams and to €30,885 for Professional Continental teams in 2018.

Curiously absent from the announcement was a pay raise for women. That’s because there’s no minimum salary for women in the professional peloton. In fact, women’s teams can continue to race without paying their riders a salary at all.

The lack of parity between the men’s and women’s teams has a long, persistent history. Some elite women have held off-season jobs to fill the gaps that racing opens in their incomes. Three-time World Champion Giorgia Bronzini, for example, served in the Italian military during her cycling career.

To some observers, the sport’s governing body, the UCI (official name: the Union Cycliste Internationale), views women’s cycling as an afterthought.

“The reason the UCI has not instituted a women’s base salary is because they do not value women equally to men,” says Kathryn Bertine, a women’s cycling advocate and former pro.

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That the UCI governs women’s cycling under the same rules as the lowest tier of professional men’s teams, known as Continental teams, seems to reinforce this perspective. The men’s Continental teams (as opposed to the mid-tier Professional Continental teams) don’t have a minimum wage, so the women don’t receive one, either. Arguably, the rulebook is misguided on both accounts.

Typically, the men’s Continental teams serve as a proving ground for young riders who hope to make the jump to a WorldTour team. Salaries are rarely public in cycling, but four-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome is believed to make more than €4 million a year. Many support riders in the men’s peloton earn six-figure salaries, which offer at least some compensation for the low salaries of their early careers.

The women’s WorldTour teams, by contrast, represent the top level of the sport. They compete in the biggest races and their rosters include world champions. Though these top teams may develop young riders, it isn’t their principal role.

“The fact that there is no base salary at the WorldTour level, let alone any salary structure in place for professional women—that is wrong on every level,” Bertine says.

When Brian Cookson took over as UCI president four years ago, he put a women’s minimum salary on his list of changes he hoped to bring to the sport. To his credit, Cookson has presided over a steady evolution in women’s cycling. Women now earn equal prize money at the UCI’s world championship events, and last year, the organization extended the distances for women’s events to 160 kilometers.

Perhaps the biggest change came with the inauguration of the Women’s World Tour, a series of single-day and stage races, in 2016. The top 20 teams in the UCI rankings compete, and race organizers are required to provide travel allowances and publicity.

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Though the Women’s World Tour has benefited the top teams, a solution to the salary issue has proven elusive. “Four years ago this was something I was saying, that we’ll have a minimum wage for women,” Cookson told Velonews in July. “It’s not that easy to just pass a rule.” He said he found some teams resistant on the grounds that they lacked the sponsorship support to implement it.

Check out this women's racing bike from Trek:

Bertine dismisses this argument. “Many people have been conditioned to think that instituting a base salary for women would cause pro teams to fall apart,” she says. “This is the metaphoric Kool-Aid the UCI wants us to drink.” In off-the-record conversations, though, some team managers have said they would struggle to find the funding to meet a minimum wage requirement.

But not all of them. When the Specialized-lululemon women’s team launched in 2011, it was part of a new generation of teams to make salaries a priority. Since then, teams such as Canyon-SRAM, WM3 Pro Cycling, and Team Sunweb have likewise sought to give their riders full-time support. (Want to train like the women pros? Check out the Big Book of Cycling for Women.)

“Of course if a person chooses cycling as their career, they are professionals, and therefore they should be paid as such,” Canyon-SRAM team manager Beth Duryea says. “It doesn't matter if they are male or female.”

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