The faster professional women’s sport closes in on the audience, money, prestige and pressure associated with men’s sport, the more strained is the fairytale about women being angels on and off the field of play.

It’s a condescending and sexist story. For all the pleasure the FIFA Women’s World Cup gave spectators last year, it was accompanied by a questionable narrative that female players didn’t dive or feign injury to win free kicks (they did, repeatedly), that they played with smiles on their faces (some did, some didn’t), and that they didn’t take winning quite as seriously, or chase it quite as obsessively, as their male counterparts.

The fairytale was not only demonstrably false but dangerous. When the then-president of the Spanish federation, Luis Rubiales, began climbing all over the victors on the podium after the final, he was enacting the view that this was a lighter-hearted event than a men’s World Cup, and that his actions would be seen as just a bit of fun. He was showing contempt not only for women but for what he perceived as an unserious competition, which amounted to one and the same.

The portrayal of professional women in sport as inherently simpler, softer and purer than men ignores the facts when like is compared with like. In tennis, where women’s professionalism has marched at the pointy end of the battle towards equality, there is no sex barrier for on-court tantrums.

Try telling Serena Williams that she competed less intensely than a man. Try telling her opponents. A former women’s world No.1, Simona Halep, is this week returning from a drugs ban. Where professional equality has been achieved, equal pay and equal scrutiny reveal – to almost nobody’s surprise – that women and men behave with equal complexity.

In the case of Sam Kerr, the facts are still to be established in a court more rigorous than The Sun and Daily Mail newspapers. Can it be racist for a woman of Indian heritage to call a police officer a ‘white bastard’? (In having her charged, is he proving her correct?) We don’t know yet.

What we do see is that women’s football, as it inches towards the income and status of the men’s game, earns more scrutiny. Kerr is one of the most famous players in the world, under levels of pressure that are new for women’s football, and she is now receiving one of celebrity’s dubious rewards.

What we know is that Kerr did not report the police charges to Football Australia. The women’s game has reached a level of professionalism where to be too embarrassed to report such a matter is no longer an excuse. If Kerr is stood down for a code of conduct violation, just as a male counterpart would be, then that is a recognition of equality.