Game, Set, Matching Pay

When Wimbledon opened play yesterday, it marked an historical moment for the oldest event in the sport of tennis: For the first time, the tournament is offering "equal pay" to competitors, increasing the women's total prize purse to equal that of the men's. This year, the male and female champions will each take home a record sum of $1.4 million.

It's hard to believe that it took the All England Lawn Tennis And Croquet Club until the year 2007 to remedy such an overt display of gender inequality; just think about the uproar it would cause if male and female executives at a Fortune 50 company were still being offered different salaries for the same position.

Luckily, Wimbledon represents the last of the four Grand Slam tournaments to even up pay between the sexes. The Australian Open and the U.S. Open have offered equal purses for years, and the French Open followed suit in 2006.

But tennis is far and away the most evolved professional sport in terms of gender equality. Take women's golf -- forget about purse size, supporters are still busy trying to get the Augusta National Club to allow women to play in the Masters Tournament at all. The purse for the PGA's U.S. Open is $7 million, whereas the LPGA's companion event offers a total of $3.1 million.

Professional basketball takes gender disparity to a whole new level, though the gender imbalance is in terms of annual pay, not the size of the prize. The NBA caps a team's total salary payout for 2007 at $53.135 million, whereas the WNBA's 2007 figure is $728,000. For the entire team.

Why do such athletic pay gaps persist unchallenged in an era where corporate ones are beyond taboo?

Apologists will argue that prize money and athletes' salaries are related to revenue generation. Groups of athletes that bring in more sponsorship cash, sell more tickets, and garner higher TV ratings have a larger pool of money for salaries and purses -- and it just so happens that in the vast majority of cases, it's men's leagues that bring home the bacon.

But it's hard to believe that relative revenue creation tells the whole story. Before the purses at Wimbledon were equalized, the men took home just slightly more than the women ($1.2 million versus $1.13 million). That small difference seems to be a more symbolic than functional one.

What would it take for female athletes' across the board to start commanding the same sums are their male counterparts?

Women's tennis has the advantage of a strong public following roughly equal to the men's side of the sport. That not only means that equal pay makes sense from a business perspective, but that the sport became an exceptionally conspicuous battleground for gender equality issues.

As with most things, it's up to the sponsors whether other sports follow suit.

by Liz Gunnison