The 146th edition of the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack is now available. It is a publication not without a sense of tradition. But they have just gone and turned the whole thing on its head, subverted their own genre — then, rather stylishly, pretended that it was no big deal. So perhaps it isn't.

They sent me a press release. You have to get to item nine on page 4 before you find the revolution, the nuclear detonation, the alteration of everything we know. That's when you discover that one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the Year is not actually a chap. Claire Taylor becomes the first woman to receive the honour since it all began in 1864.

Why not, the Almanack asks, awash with false naivety. After all, the England women's cricket team won all nine of the one-dayers they completed last summer and Taylor was dismissed only twice by a bowler; England also retained the Ashes in a one-off match in Australia in which Taylor scored 79 and 64.

Meanwhile, the May Wisden Cricketer magazine has England's World Cup winners on the cover, Charlotte Edwards, the captain, waving the trophy about.

It seems that we now actually notice women's cricket. We have moved on a micron or so. All the same, the difference between the attention given to the men's and the women's game is dramatic: six of 1,680 pages in Wisden are devoted to women's cricket. This newspaper, in common with all others, gives the women's game a great deal less coverage than the men's.

It is the same with women's football. The game exists and is ferociously competitive, but the rewards, the audiences and the coverage cannot match that of the men's game. The media mostly reflects the expectations and demands of the target audience and if a newspaper seeks to change these things, it must be done by degrees. You can't, you really can't, suddenly start giving equal space to Arsenal and to Arsenal Ladies if you wish to continue selling newspapers.

But all the same, it is clear that society is changing, and that sport and the coverage of sport reflects this. You can watch women's football and cricket on television, sometimes even on terrestrial television. You can read about women's team sports more than you used to. On the other hand, we are a still a very long way from equality. Taylor won't be playing for millions in the Indian Premier League for a start.

What's the answer, then? Sepp Blatter, president of Fifa, said that women footballers need to wear sexier kit. This now-notorious remark was at once seized upon as offensive nonsense. But let's have a think about this. Is it possible that the daft old sod has a point?

There are two mainstream sports — sports that require a Times correspondent — in which women and men get a roughly equal prominence, tennis and athletics. So is there any common ground? In both sports, men and women often compete at the same venue, but not for the same prizes. Male and female athletes compete at the same track and field meetings; at the tennis grand-slams, there is a male and a female champion, both equally celebrated and, these days, equally paid. And how do the men and the women choose to present themselves to their public?

Now let us set aside the brazen sexiness and attention-seeking of Maria Sharapova and Yelena Isinbayeva and, at the same time, look beyond the macho posing of Linford Christie and the younger Rafael Nadal. Let us look at average rather than extreme.

When we do so, we find a very pronounced emphasis, not on sex but on gender. Both men and women make it very clear to which sex they belong. The leading women's sports are marked by a pronounced sexual dimorphism.

Neither Paula Radcliffe nor Martina Navratilova has traded on their sexiness, in the Anna Kournikova sense of the term. Nevertheless, Navratilova, until her post-championship days at any rate, always wore a dress, while Radcliffe wears knickers and crop top. The clear implication is that both are asking to be judged as exceptional female athletes, exceptional female performers, exceptional female champions.

It is not a question of whether or not Sharapova would beat Nadal, or whether Radcliffe could win the men's marathon. Rather, it is that in these two sports, men and women have an equal validity because men and women are clearly different. This essential point is rammed home by clothes that emphasise sexual differences.

So what would happen if they went mad for gender-specific clothing in other sports? I don't suppose that if women footballers and cricketers started to play in bikinis or ballgowns that their superstars would instantly be as recognisable as the Williams sisters, or Kevin Pietersen or Cristiano Ronaldo.

The fact is that women don't play like Pietersen or Ronaldo. At a superficial glance, women's football and women's cricket look like a watered-down version of the men's game: slighter figures wearing the same kit doing the same thing but, apparently, less well.

This is an understandable but wrong-headed judgment. The batting in the women's game has a different style: no heaves across the line with a five-pound bat; more deflection, more placement, more emphasis on timing. Women cricketers like to say that they play a better, more classical game.

Women's football lacks the power of the men's game and has a different pattern and rhythm. The women's game advances, especially in the United States - where many see sah-kurr as a game primarily for women — but not as fast as its enthusiasts wish. And still its most famous image is the victory celebrations of Brandi Chastain, the United States footballer, who whipped off her shirt to celebrate winning the World Cup in 1999 to reveal her — perfectly decorous — sports bra. The image is not sexy, but it ensures that the sexual dimorphism point is made once again.

Women are not athletically inferior to men. In most sports, women operate to different kinds — different standards if you must — of performance. But it is a physiological fact that in many ways women are physically superior to men. When it comes to extreme endurance, tolerance of pain, coping with extremes of temperature and sense of balance, women beat men every time. But most sporting events - being invented by men - are not tough enough to reach the point at which female superiority kicks in.

We are left with the realisation that the world's attitude to women's sport is changing, but the process is, like a glacier, slow and inexorable rather than, like a flash flood, altering everything in an instant of time. Before 1984 there was no women's marathon at the Olympic Games, before 2007 the Wimbledon men's champion took home more than the women's champion. Now we have a woman in Wisden, how long before the next?

But the point that matters most is that sport tends to celebrate the differences between men and women, not their similarities. Both sexes seek triumph and pursue excellence, but we tend to do it in different ways. Sport is moving at a snail's pace towards a greater equality — while at the same time emphasising that equal is quite different from identical.