A week ago Michelle Payne became the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup.

I'd never heard of the Melbourne Cup before moving to New Zealand, but discovered that in both Australia and NZ this is a massive deal. It's easily as big a deal as the Grand National, with sweepstakes in every workplace and many people actually stopping work to watch the race itself.

Payne's victory appears to have been totally unexpected. She was riding a 100-1 outsider and had had to fight to keep her seat. After the race she was widely reported as saying some of the consortium of owners of her horse, Prince of Penzance, had tried to replace her with a man.

She also slammed the "chauvinistic" attitude of the horseracing world.

“It’s such a chauvinistic sport, a lot of the owners wanted to kick me off. Everyone else can get stuffed [who] think women aren’t good enough,” she said, quoted here by the Guardian.

A bit of research reveals Payne is not the only woman to have won a big race this year. In April Katie Walsh became the third female jockey to win the Irish Grand National.

But by and large, although horseracing is one of the only sports where women and men can compete side-by-side, it's apparent that the likes of Payne and Walsh are still in a significant minority. Although women have competed in the Grand National none of them have ever won it, for instance.

There's better news from the world of equestrianism - show-jumping, dressage and eventing - where women have been competing equally with men for 50 years. And it shows: at the 2012 London Olympics, women won all three dressage medals and silver and bronze (to Michael Jung's gold) in individual eventing. With men winning all three individual jumping medals, that meant women won five out of the nine available individual equestrian medals. They also made up a majority of the medal-winning dressage and eventing teams, but were not represented in the winning jumping teams.

This picture of a high female participation rate is borne out in Sport England's statistics. A reminder - in this chart, the orange line is female and the blue male, and the percentages are the percentage of the English population which participates in equestrianism regularly.

Sport England doesn't publish stats on horseracing, I assume as this is primarily a professional sport. Meanwhile the British Horseracing Board seems to focus on the horses and how much money is involved in the sport (answer: a lot).

I couldn't find stats on the number of female jockeys currently registered in the UK on either the BHB website or that of the Professional Jockeys Association or Amateur Jockeys Association. There are hundreds of jockeys listed on the BHB register, ranked by number of races and 'strike rate' and there are very few women at the top end of both the flat and jump lists.

I don't know enough about horseracing to judge why this is so, but in a sport which is made for small, light people and where there are a lot of women working - men outnumber female staff in the industry, but not by a massive amount - it seems odd that there aren't more Michelle Paynes. It's a double shame, because not only has she proven her ability to beat her male peers on an unfancied horse, but she's also done a brilliant job at getting this issue into the public eye.

And so to Michelle Payne, I say a resounding "brava", both for winning the Melbourne Cup and for telling the male establishment to "get stuffed".