Sports – Equal Prize Money for Men and Women

Of course women should be paid equal pay – for equal work. The work being done isn’t equal, so there’s no discrimination. Sports fans are interested in the highest levels of performance, so the highest athletic prizes should go to the competitors who are strongest, fastest, most powerful or who have the greatest endurance. It is coincidental that for biological reasons such competitors are almost always men.

Firstly, in tennis men play ‘best of five sets’ matches; women play only three. In weightlifting, they lift more weight. It’s therefore perfectly reasonable for the men to be paid more as the men are doing more work. Since records began, the average men’s tennis game at Wimbledon has taken on 30 minutes longer to play than the average women’s game. Thus, on average the men’s champion will have played 3½ hours more tennis than the women’s. If women want the same prize money, they should be prepared to play the same number of sets (thus providing more advertising time for networks, from which much of Wimbledon’s revenue – and thus the prize fund – comes), or in the weightlifting example, lift more weights.

The men’s game is also more contested at the top. 52% of men’s games went into at least the 4th set at Wimbledon 2002, whilst only 24% of women’s matches made it to the 3rd set. This suggests a greater, and thus more exciting, contest, which feeds into popularity (see argument 2). But it also points to the fact that men at the height of their game have to perform and train harder, and for longer than the women do, enduring more pain, risking more injuries, and delivering higher levels of performance. Again – the work isn’t equal, so neither is the pay.

The market decides the ratio of reward – and there isn’t a fairer method of deciding than that. The male game is more popular. It’s more powerful and many find it more exciting. If that were different, the pay scale would be too. Rewards come from consumers: if women’s tennis or weightlifting or cycling were more popular than men’s, they’d be paid more than men. For the same reasons, heavyweight (male) boxers get much greater rewards than boxers in lighter weight categories.

It is not really fair that tournaments in which both sexes (separately) compete, such as Wimbledon, are singled out for campaigns for equality, as different levels of popularity and physical ability has resulted in this differentiation across all major sports – such as soccer, rugby, cricket, basketball, baseball. There is a danger that sports administrators will decide the best way to avoid forced equality is to scrap joint tournaments in which men and women compete at the same time in parallel competitions. This could have the unintended consequence of reducing the opportunities for women to compete at the top level and so to earn the highest financial rewards.

It is the tournaments that offer equal prize money that stand out, not those that differentiate. Wimbledon and the French Open both have larger men’s prizes. Only very recently have half of the Grand Slams paid equal money, and in the wider tennis world an imbalance is still normal. In other sports, such as weightlifting, very few joint events pay equal prize money.

On the contrary, this is an accepted principle in world sports and anyone trying to blackmail a tournament would lose public sympathy themselves. They also wouldn’t change anything except denying themselves the chance to compete, as winning is so prestigious that plenty of other women will still enter and protestors will just get forgotten as the tournament progresses.