A junior surfing competition has attracted global attention after a podium photo showing the best female won half as much as the male champ.

Zoe Steyn won ZAR4000 (AUD$400), while Rio Waida, the male winner, surfed his way to ZAR8000 (AUD$800) at the Billabong Pro Junior series in Ballito, South Africa, on the weekend.

That this could be a bad look apparently did not occur to the surf comp's organisers, who posted the pic on the Ballito Pro Facebook page.

Here's another look at the figures on the cheque.

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Whatsapp Rio Waida and Zoe Steyn with their winners cheques at the Ballito Pro in South Africa.

The post was shared thousands of times, with comments such as:

"Did the girls surf a different ocean that was easier we don't know about?"

"This is ridiculous. It is not 1918, it is 2018. The competition organisers should be deeply ashamed of themselves. What are we teaching our girls through this sort of archaic discrimination."

Ballito Pro then attempted to handball the criticism to the World Surf League (WSL), which is the governing body of the event. It said the WSL determines all prize money, and the organisers had brought the pay disparity to the league's attention.

So we asked the WSL what was going on.

'Men get double the money, because there are double the competitors'

WSL Australia/Oceania Regional Manager Will Hayden-Smith told Hack the Ballito Pro photo "on first glance does look like a huge disparity".

"It highlights an issue, but it's a very complicated one," he said.

The WSL argument comes down to the concept of prize-money-per-surfer, which it says shows the equality of pay between male and female competitors.

It works like this: say there are 10 surfers competing for a total pot of $100 in prize money. That works out to a ratio of $10-per-surfer. The winner gets $50, and the runners up get the rest.

Now say there is a female competition of five surfers. At the same ratio of $10-per-surfer, the total prize money is $50. The winner gets only $25.

That was the case at the Ballito Pro, the WSL said. There were twice as many male surfers as female ones: 36 compared to 18. To keep the same money-per-surfer ratio for men and women, the prize money for the female winner had to be half as much as the men.

"Men get double the prize money only because there are double the competitors," Will Hayden-Smith said.

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Whatsapp Two couples surfboarding in Florida in 1965.

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Whatsapp Tyler Wright is one of the highest paid surfers int he world.

The same thing happens at Australian junior surfing events.

"In Australia, the prize money at a junior event is $2,500 for women and $5,000 for men. In the men's field we have 64 surfers and in the women's field we have 24."

The solutions to this would be to either just scrap the ratio system that leads to female winners competing for less, or to increase the number of female surfers to match that of the men.

The WSL said that neither were options right now.

"The demand is simply not there," Will Hayden-Smith said.

"We usually have a waiting list of about four surfers to get into the women's competition."

"On the men's side we have about 30-40 on the waiting list.

"If the demand was there on the women's side we would expand the draws."

Would increasing prize money increase popularity?

Critics have argued that one way of increasing the popularity of women's surfing could be to increase the amount of prize money.

More than 10 years after the conservative organisers of Wimbledon agreed to award equal prize money to female tennis players, surfing's stance may look dated.

The male-dominated sport has struggled to shed its hyper-masculine image and complaints of entrenched sexism. Top female pro surfers have said they are expected to wear bikinis instead of boardies when they compete in order to attract sponsors.

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Whatsapp A surfer in a pro event in Brazil in 2011.

Two years ago, former top 10 surfer Rebecca Woods told the ABC sponsors were ignoring female surf talent in favour of model looks.

She said that after she was dropped by her sponsor, Billabong, she had to spend up to $30,000 of her savings per year to go on tour.

"And you know, seeing certain girls that would rock up at events with their g-strings pulled very high up their bum and getting paid a lot of money basically just to do that," she said.

"And then they lose in their first heat."

'Women's surfing has done better than other women's sports'

Will acknowledged that, whatever the reason for the difference in prize money, the Ballito Pro photo circulating online could be a bad look for the sport.

He said female surfers also struggled more than male surfers to get sponsored.

"That's one reason we charge less entry fees," he said.

"At the QS 6,000 pro surf event in Manly in March, the entry fee for the men was US$250 and for women US$150," he said.

"This was just because we felt that if we charge the same entry fee that would prohibit women from competing."

He said surfing had been running a women's championship tour for four decades, and had done a better job of equal pay than other sports.

Two years ago, we reported that an entire women's AFL team cost less than a single average male player - most female players were earning about $5,000 a year, while the average male AFL footballer was taking home about $300,000.

Will pointed out that the world's best paid female surfer, Tyler Wright, earned hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In 2016, she earned more than the top male surfer.

"We do want to note the fact we have done a lot of things right at the championship level," he said.

"We do acknowledge there's room for improvement."