If You Want Equal Pay, The First Step Should Be Equal Play

Saturday, July 07, 2007

(posted by OMDQ)

I would first like to state, for the record, that I am all about equal rights for men and women. As we all learned from Ron Burgundy, diversity is NOT an old, old wooden ship, and I'm cool with that.

But answer me this: if someone does less work than you, if they are scheduled to do less work than you, should they be paid as much as you, based solely on their gender?

I would say no. But that's the way things are in the tennis world right now. Venus Williams won the women's singles title at Wimbledon today, earning the same $1.41 million that will be given to Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal tomorrow, and spoke at length about the impact that Billie Jean King had had on securing equal prize money for both men and women.

That's all well and good. I don't think any reasonable person has a problem with guys and gals receiving equal pay. The problem, in my view, is that the guys play a best-of-five, the gals a best-of-three. In all but one possible situation - the women's match goes the distance while the men's goes the minimum - the guys are going to play more, meaning they will likely make less per set than their female counterparts.

If we're really going for equality here, shouldn't Venus be fighting to have those extra two sets added to the women's game?

Posted by One More Dying Quail at 2:28 PM

5 Comments:

Honestly, everyone should be playing three-set matches -- mostly because the tennis is just so tough to watch these days.

But physically, I don't think there's a reason why the women can't do five-setters.

Signal to Noise said...
Jul 7, 2007, 3:05:00 PM  

great post, AA... wrote about this over a year ago on a now-defunct blog: http://petulant-times.blogspot.com/2006/04/but-whos-counting.html

Anonymous said...
Jul 7, 2007, 3:20:00 PM  

panger, you couldn't have put that much better.

s2n, I figure there would be an adjustment period while they get used to the increase, but over time, I'm sure the overall quality of the tennis wouldn't suffer.

Jul 7, 2007, 3:28:00 PM  

I don't think anyone could stand watching Venus or Serena slug the crap out of someone for an extra set. Two sets is bad enough.

As for women's physical capacity to play best of five, there's no doubt in my mind they could handle it.

Kevin Hayward said...
Jul 7, 2007, 4:03:00 PM  

you know why women can't go 5 sets? damage to the vocal chords after 5 hours of constant screaming and grunting

the great bambi said...
Jul 8, 2007, 7:54:00 AM  

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