Women can now, finally, earn a living playing football. The England and Scotland women’s teams have just qualified for the World Cup and, having finished third in the 2015 World Cup, the England women’s team is the most successful senior national team since 1966. Women’s football is the fastest growing participation sport in the country, yet remains woefully underfunded.

The latest story of shame comes from Crystal Palace, where some Crystal Palace Ladies players were told to each find £250 in sponsorship. This at a club where the men’s side spent £32m on a striker who has managed a grand total of 18 league goals in two seasons. Luckily, their star player, Wilfried Zaha, stepped in with a charitable donation to help support the team, but how have we got here?

We’re back to the old chicken-and-egg problem that we’ve been hearing for decades: “No one watches women’s football so we can’t fund it.” But if nobody is willing to put in the money to build it up, how can we expect the public to come to watch?

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TV revenue drives the men’s game. Hundreds of millions of pounds pour into the Premier League from television companies, but it’s a struggle to even get the women’s game on air and there is a petition to force broadcasters to televise properly international women’s games.

Commercial broadcasters may argue that there isn’t a market, but we need to create it. The FA is forcing the issue by insisting that the infrastructure for the women’s game has to be there if a team want to compete in the Women’s Super League. The FA is forcing clubs to invest and some Premier League teams are catching up – Manchester United finally have a women’s team; West Ham have just gone professional and some teams, like Tottenham, have been built up properly, from the grassroots, remaining embedded in their community and espousing all the things we love about great teams.

But these few examples aren’t enough; this has to be for all teams. In 2016, the Women’s Equality party, alongside the West Ham women’s team, called on FA-affiliated clubs that run a men’s team to share training facilities equally with their women’s teams, to promote women’s games equally on their websites, to sell a women’s kit through their official stores, and put forward their female stars for interview as often as male players, to make them the subject of an equal number of articles and features. This will help raise awareness and interest in the game, and help to make it self-sufficient. There’s still work to be done and, with all the hats I wear in football as well as the one I wear for the Women’s Equality party, that is what I am aiming to achieve.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Wilfried Zaha stepped in with a charitable donation.’ Photograph: Joe Toth/BPI/Rex/Shutterstock

This shouldn’t be such a hardship for men’s teams – and in the medium term could become another moneyspinner. Tottenham, for example, in promoting their new kit, ensure that the stars of the women’s team stand alongside the men.

We should not find ourselves in the situation in which a rich benefactor, albeit one with excellent intentions, is the reason why a women’s team affiliated to a Premier League men’s club can exist. Zaha has shone a light on this for us all: funding for women’s football must be sustainable. This will only happen if the top teams, along with broadcasters, recognise the power of women’s football for women and girls up and down the country, but also for equity and equality more widely.

Our beautiful game is our national game. There are children and adults all over the country playing and supporting football – there’s enough reach for everyone to have some of that pie. So let’s make it so. After all, equality is better for everyone.

• Chris Paouros is on the Fans for Diversity guidance group and is an elected member of the Women’s Equality Party steering committee