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Serena Williams’s earnings having dropped on account of her pregnancy last year, there is no woman among the top 100 members of sport’s Rich List. This isn’t greatly surprising, and it’s even less surprising that some indignation has been expressed, and that there have been rousing calls for closing the“gender pay gap”. Apparently Paris St-Germain’s Brazilian star Neymar earns more than all the professional woman footballers in the USA put together. Shocking, isn’t it? So far, however, nobody has, I think, yet come up with a plan for redistribution such as, for instance, a 1O percent levy on top male footballers, proceeds to be distributed among female ones.
Neymar, like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, undoubtedly earns what seems to most of us ordinary mortals a grotesque amount of money. So do champion boxers. So do Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal, and Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson and, even in what is probably the twilight of their careers, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. And no woman athlete of any kind, not even Serena Williams or Maria Sharapova, who also used to be in the top 100, can match the earnings of any of those named.
How come? Well, it’s reasonable to start with the tennis players. Yes, there’s still an earnings gap there, partly because in the four Slam tournaments, men play 5-five set matches, women 3-set ones. Yet one suspects the gap would still exist and even be much the same size there if this wasn’t the case. Nevertheless, though tennis is one sport where something closer to equality has been attained, the gap is no nearer to being closed than seemed likely twenty-five or thirty years ago.
Why? Well, in the first thirty years after Tennis went open in 1968-9 there were times when women’s tennis seemed as popular and got as much attention at the Slams as men’s. Players like Billie Jean King, Margaret Smith, Evonne Goolagong (later Cawley), Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Lindsay Davenport, Steffi Graf , Monica Seles, and the very young Martina Hingis were stars; and they were also personalities. Since then few other than the Williams sisters and Sharapova are known to anyone except the most enthusiastic tennis fans.
In the 1980s and 90s the Ladies Final at Wimbledon often excited as much interest as the Men’s. This hasn’t been the case for a long time. Even so, everybody knew that Navratilova or Graf would have been fairly easily defeated by John McEnroe or Pete Sampras, just as over the last ten years one would have been amazed if Serena Williams had taken a set against Federer or Nadal.
Just as in tennis, there are many very good female golfers, and women’s golf, like women’s tennis, has a long history now. But the Ladies Open doesn’t vie with the Men’s for attention, nor does the Solheim Cup with the Ryder Cup. No doubt this is partly because it is still the case that men are more likely than women to watch a lot of sport, but only partly.
Professional sport is a meritocracy, a world where the market determines financial rewards. This is so obvious that it needs to be said, because it is easy to shut your eyes to the obvious. One way of illustrating this truth is to compare not the earnings gap between men and women, interesting as this may be, but the gap between one sport and another.
Rugby Union is a popular sport in a dozen countries in the world and quite popular in many others, but in global terms its appeal is small in comparison with football’s. Consequently, though the best international players in the UK,Ireland, France, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia may now earn handsome salaries, and in some case a lot of money from endorsements, there is a huge wealth gap between them and leading footballers.
We may think that there is crazy money in football, but there is crazy money there only because of the global popularity of the game. I have no idea how many Manchester United or Barcelona shirts are sold in China every year, but I know that Leinster and Saracens, currently the two best Rugby Union clubs in Europe, will sell very few there, if indeed any.
Football wages were once regulated – in England and Scotland, the League authorities imposed a maximum wage until the courts ruled that this was illegal in the early sixties. Though even then football was more popular than cricket, drawing much bigger crowds, leading English Test cricketers probably earned a bit more than professional footballers. Once the maximum wage was abolished in football, earnings soared, Fulham and England’s Johnny Haynes being hailed as the first £100-a-week footballer. They’re all paid a bit more than that now.
It is only recently that women’s cricket, football and rugby have won much media attention. It isn’t unfair to say that the sudden willingness of TV companies to give them such attention is partly because of a desire to avoid accusations of sexism, partly because the proliferation of channels showing sport means that there is both more competition and a new need to fill slots with – to be frank – almost anything.
Some remain very sceptical, even scornful, thinking of women’s football, rugby or cricket much as Dr Johnson did of a woman’s preaching which he compared to a dog walking on its hind legs – not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all. This may be rather harsh, but there is evidently a gap in the standard and quality of the play just as there is a gap in the financial rewards. Theoretically there is no obvious reason why a woman shouldn’t be a good enough cricketer to play alongside men at first-class, even Test match, level; but it seems unlikely.
One reason why this is so is that there are areas of sport where it is possible to make a fair and direct comparison between the performance of men and women. The most obvious is athletics. Men and woman run the same distances, jump the same jumps, throw the same implements, but the men run faster, jump higher or further, and throw further too. This doesn’t mean that women’s athletics can’t be, or indeed aren’t, as interesting and compelling, as men’s, or , if you like, as good in their way. Moreover, I should say that in athletics women’s events are as popular with spectators –and TV companies – as men’s.
The Sporting Rich List makes the existence of a “gender pay gap” very obvious. This is not however something that can be redressed by regulation. Once sport becomes more than recreation – once, that is to say, it becomes work, a trade or profession – it exists in the market-place and rewards are commensurate with popular appeal. There are sports where women compete on level terms – equestrian ones like show-jumping, eventing and dressage, for instance – and there can be no good reason why there should be different levels of financial reward for men and women there. There are even some at which women are more successful than men (salmon-fishing, for instance). This however is an amateur sport for which you have to pay.
Finally, forgetting for a moment the iniquity of the absence of women from the Rich List, one might remark that women who are active and successful, even just fairly successful, in a well-established professional sport like tennis, golf or athletics, will usually earn more than men who play a sport or game that has little or no appeal to the TV companies.
It’s all a question of where there is a market to be satisfied.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.