It’s just been announced that this year’s men’s and women’s Wimbledon singles champions will each receive £2 million (nearly $3 million).
Last year’s champions, Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic, each walked off with £1.88 million ($2.74 million).
But whoever wins this year’s Grand Slam tournament will collect an extra £120,000 ($175,000) – a 6.4% increase.
By any standards this seems like a mind-boggling sum to pocket for winning seven tennis matches, but it is bound to re-open the debate about why women tennis players receive the same amount of prize money as men.
Wimbledon changed its rules in 2007 to guarantee equal winnings but it is an open secret the policy remains a bone of contention.
It’s easy to see why.
At Wimbledon, women play the best of three sets during each match.
Because they therefore need to win only two sets to emerge victorious, matches are often completed in little more than an hour.
Men play the best of five sets.
Their matches often last three hours or more.
In essence, the female players do less work at Wimbledon than the male players but are paid the same amount in prize money anyway.
It is a certainty that whoever wins the men’s singles at Wimbledon this year will have spent far longer on court over the course of the championships than the winning woman.
Everybody knows that winning Wimbledon for a man is a far more time-consuming task – and a far harder one – than it is for a woman.
Yet political correctness demands that none of the players speaks about this publicly and women must continue to be paid as much as men anyway.
Putting aside the pleasure of picking up a massive financial reward for winning a tournament, many women players must in their hearts find the equal prize money rule deeply patronizing.
Certainly, I have never heard any of them – or indeed anybody else – justify it on any logical or reasonable grounds.
Surely, in the equal world for which feminists fought, the amount of money women get out of the competition would reflect the amount of time they spend on court playing tennis?
Or would that discriminate against them?
