The rise of multi-sport star Ellyse Perry is one of the reasons for the growing interest in the women's cricket team, the Southern Stars, the Matildas and the national netball team, the Diamonds. FOR most of the past century, Australian women playing male-dominated sports were so deep in the shade of their male counterparts that they virtually never saw the sun. But suddenly a little light is starting to shine on them. Call it the sporting version of global warming. In May, Cricket Australia ushered in an era of professionalism for female cricketers when it announced that the top tier of female players would receive a massive pay rise. The very best of the Southern Stars will now earn a living wage of up to $80,000 a year. Earlier this month, SBS provided live television coverage of the Australian women's soccer team, the Matildas, taking on France in a friendly, building on the ABC's work in showing a weekly W League fixture. Anyone who was awake at 4am to see it got their money's worth as the Asian Cup-winning Matildas upset the World Cup semi-finalists 2-0. Both of those breakthroughs came hot on the heels of dual international Ellyse Perry being proclaimed one of the 50 most marketable athletes on the planet by an international sports magazine. Perry, who continues to play both cricket and soccer for her country, is in the best position to take advantage of the rising profile of both her teams. Meanwhile, one of Australia's best-known netballers, Mo'onia Gerrard, announced that she was switching sports in a bid to crack the Australian Sevens rugby team in time for the 2016 Olympics, a move that also attracted an unusual flash of publicity. The ARU is putting time and money into the sevens program, recognising that the Australian women's team is its best shot to win a medal when the sport makes its Olympic debut in Rio. Australia's women's teams -- the Southern Stars, the Matildas, the sevens team, basketball's Opals, the Hockeyroos, rugby league's Jillaroos, netball's Diamonds -- appear to be reaching a tipping point, where regular coverage and rising public interest will establish them in the national psyche in a way that their predecessors could only dream of. In her day, Belinda Clark was the highest profile female cricketer in the land but she has seen "drastic shifts" in the game since she retired in 2005, although she traces their origins back to the integration of the men's and women's associations in 2001. "That gave us access to resources -- not just financial but human, and marketing expertise," she says. Clark points to a number of factors that have given the women's game momentum -- support from CA, which has been able to get the national team on to television as part of its deal with the Nine Network, the success of the women's team, the increase in international playing opportunities created by the International Cricket Council and the public interest in Perry's bilateral approach to her sport. Women's participation in the game has increased by 18 per cent in the past year, to 180,000. One consequence is an extended Ashes series for the women in England next month, which will comprise one Test match, three one-day internationals and three Twenty20 games. Two of the T20 matches will be televised in England and highlights are likely to be packaged for Australia. "In the last two years the amount of cricket the national team is playing has increased and that's what you need to promote and market the game; the cornerstone is more cricket," Clark says. Clark, who now runs Cricket Australia's centre of excellence, says she always believed that women's cricket was a product worth watching, it just needed to be seen. We've played more T20 to get more TV coverage. I knew we had something that was marketable and watchable because every person I met who saw it was surprised at how good we were. We just had to get to the mass audience. Clark hopes cricket's example will improve the financial conditions for the leading women in other team sports. "When one sport takes a step forward, the other sports try and catch up," she says. While this may sound like heresy to her employers at CA, Clark admits she doesn't care which sport they play, "as long as girls get the same opportunities as boys." She does see one advantage in the delayed professionalisation of women's sport. She hopes it can avoid the behavioural issues that have been a prominent characteristic of male professionalism. "We need to make sure we don't create people who have no connection with society," she says. It is important that people have balance and a broad perspective. Putting people in cocoons isn't good for them and it isn't good for sport. In soccer, Australia's new FIFA executive member Moya Dodd also identifies a variety of push and pull factors driving the public profile of the Matildas. "The Matildas have been on part-time contracts for the last few years which has given them a bit of stability of income," she says. In my day (Dodd played for Australia from 1986 to 1995) we paid to play. But she sees an "inexorable rise" in the profile of the Matildas based on their international success (quarter-finals at the past two World Cups) and playing "entertaining and gutsy" soccer. "There's been an irreversible change in the resourcing and credibility given to the women's game," she says. She also notes that women's soccer has already come a long way in a short time. "The women's game was banned for most of the last century, from the 1920s to the 1970s; our first national team was in 1978 and 1998 was the first World Cup," she says. Now there's a generation of girls growing up knowing that it's normal and acceptable to play football. In the 1980s there were about 10,000 (female) players in Australia and now there are 106,000, so that's tenfold growth. Full professionalism may be some way off but Dodd has no doubt about the impact it will have on the game. "I think it's terrific to see top sportswomen paid at a level where they can give up their day jobs," she says. Once we cross that bridge it will be transformational in terms of the standard of play.