It will be an eerie sight this week when grounds around Australia host the opening round of the men’s AFL competition with empty stands. In the space of two weeks, the Melbourne Cricket Ground will have gone from a jubilant crowd of green, gold and blue to a silent concrete colosseum, save for the familiar sounds of umpires’ whistles, the thud of boot meeting ball, colliding bodies and calls to “play on”.

What we would give to instead see 86,174 fans adding their chorus to the mix, not least for what it would signal about life in Australia returning to normal. Only, that particular crowd count was anything but normal: it was nearly the largest crowd ever seen for a standalone women’s sporting event, beaten only by the 1999 Fifa Women’s World Cup at the California Rose Bowl.

March 8 will be remembered as the date Australia seized glory on International Women’s Day in the final of the Women’s Twenty20 World Cup: the crowning achievement in a dawning era of women’s professional sport in this country. However, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the rapid growth in women’s professional sport threatens to grind to a halt, seemingly as quickly as it exploded.

There has been much consternation over the prospect of an Australia without sport, but in some of the commentary – from the impact on player wages to topics for water cooler conversations – it is clear whose absence is bemoaned. It appears that sport, or at least the version that counts in Australia, is still men’s sport. How quickly we forget that women are professional athletes, too.

It is worth considering how women’s sport is particularly vulnerable to the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, which is likely to hit Australian professional sport hard and unevenly, threatening the existence of less robust competitions like Super Rugby.

Yet even in richer leagues like the AFL’s men’s competition, there is talk of pay cuts, a move also being considered by the NRL. At least for now the games will go on, albeit with tightened belts, shorter seasons and no spectators. Meanwhile, and in an apparent double standard, the AFLW season has been curtailed in the hope that an expedited finals series can be played before it becomes untenable.

The W-League will host its crowd-free grand final this weekend, just in the nick of time. But the victorious Australian women’s cricket team will be denied the chance to continue entertaining cricket fans around the world, with their tour of South Africa later this month now suspended. Add to this the doubt hanging over the French Open and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, traditionally stages where Australians embrace their female athletes as equals, and the situation for women’s sport looks dire.

Elsewhere, the WNBA in the United States is sweating, having just “betted big” on women’s basketball by agreeing to a new contract that will double players’ salaries and provide paid maternity leave. What happens if the product that the league is banking on disappears overnight? Thankfully there is time for contingency planning, with the season not due to start until 15 May. But as observed by Marianne Martin, winner of the first and short lived women’s Tour De France in 1984: “[Sport] is a business, and if something is not profitable, it goes away.”

Recent comments by Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggest that the government has its hands full putting out the economic spot fires of a pandemic without adding national sporting codes to the list. In a context where professional female footballers still attract a double take, vigilance is needed to ensure we don’t relegate the women’s game to the sidelines, elevate men’s sport alone as critical to the nation’s morale, or judge empty stands differently – “normal” for women, as compared to the clear result of an unprecedented global crisis for men.

North Melbourne AFLW captain Emma Kearney recently reflected: “It will be interesting to see how the men manage playing with no fans.” We might also ask: what will we learn about gender and sport during the coronavirus? Will we notice whether the “watchability” of men’s football games changes in the absence of crowd noise reverberating around the stands and into our living rooms, or will we reserve that critique for women’s sport only?

As Cathy Freeman’s triumph in front of 110,000 fans at the Sydney Olympic Games should tell us, female athletes are every bit watchable when we choose to support them.