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Each time a tennis Grand Slam rolls around so too does the question of whether men and women should receive the same prize money.
Men, after all, play for longer. They also player a better brand of tennis, right?
Just ask Australia’s Marinko Matosevic. When asked if he would hire a female coach, like Andy Murray has done with Amelie Mauresmo, Matosevic replied, “I don’t think that highly of the women’s game.”
Matosevic’s comment, like the question of equal prize money, speaks to a much bigger problem in tennis and in sport: sexism.
Let’s start with tennis.
Does anyone remember Anna Kournikova? Sure you do. The beautiful, young, blonde Russian who was earning between $10-$15 million in endorsements in the early 2000s. But do you remember her winning a tournament? That’s not so clear, is it?
Kournikova never won a singles WTA tennis tournament. Despite this, she remains etched in our memory because of her model-looks.
Today, another Russian (born) tennis player, Maria Sharapova, is the most highly endorsed female athlete in the world. Like Kournikova, she is beautiful. Unlike Kournikova, she is a four-time Grand Slam singles winner and a winner of a career Grand Slam.
Only 10 women in the history of tennis have achieved a career Grand Slam. This puts Sharapova in the company of women such as Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Chris Evert, Margaret Court and Serena Williams. These women are true champions of the game and Sharapova’s name sits comfortably next to them.
Despite this, Sharapova is often compared to her Russian predecessor, Kournikova, because of their shared model looks and large sponsorship endorsements.
Are male tennis players compared for such trivial things? Do male tennis players get sponsorship deals for the way they look? Or are they purely based on their athletic prowess?
As far as tennis is concerned, where prize money has reached parity in Grand Slams, these questions are not inherently problematic. Regardless of your gender, if you are the best you will receive the same prize money.
In other sports, however, where prize money is inherently unequal, questions of sponsorship, sexual exploitation and fairness are much more problematic.
In this year’s BRW top 50 sports earners’ list, only two entries were female: Samantha Stosur (ranked 29) and Stephanie Gilmore (ranked 32).
Stosur, a tennis player, earns equal prize money as her male counterparts. Gilmore, a surfer and five-time World Champion, does not. In fact, the prize pool for female surfers is only half of what the men receive.
The problem, however, does not stop there. Female surfers, and female athletes in general, are marketed in a highly sexualised way. The agility, endurance and strength of these athletes is replaced by images more closely aligned with society’s parochial expectations of women – the sex symbol, the good girl, the ‘girl next door’.
Recently, a 13-year-old Australian girl, Olive Bowers, wrote a letter to the editor of surfing magazine Tracks, condemning the way in which the so-called ‘Surfers’ Bible’ objectified women. Bowers lamented that the only picture she could find of a female surfer in Tracks was one of a surfer not on a beach, but “standing in a dark room” in a skimpy outfit.
The implication to be drawn from this is that female surfers and male surfers are not viewed as sporting equals; that, for a female surfer to be pictured in the magazine, she must be sexually exploited.
Also named in the BRW top 50 earners’ list were 11 cricketers, with Shane Watson (ranked six) and captain Michael Clarke (ranked seven) earning $6 million and $5 million respectively.
One cricketer that didn’t make the cut, however, was Ellyse Perry. Unknown to many, Perry is one of Australia’s greatest athletes, playing both cricket and football professionally. It is for this reason that SportsPro named Perry Australia’s most marketable athlete last year.
So why is she not as well known, let alone as well paid, as players such as Clarke and Watson? Is it because she hasn’t marketed herself half-naked on a calendar?
It’s hard not to be cynical, but you do the math.
So should men and women receive the same prize money at Grand Slams? Hell yes.
It’s one of the few times where men and women are seen as sporting equals, and a reminder that much more needs to be achieved when it comes to sexism in sport.
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