Ukrainian tennis player hits out at the sport’s gender pay gap, asking, ‘Are we really that bad?’

The Ukrainian tennis player Marta Kostyuk has strike out at the sport’s gender fork out hole.

A study very last 12 months uncovered that elite female tennis gamers earn on ordinary 34% significantly less than their male counterparts.

On Thursday, the 19-calendar year-previous Kostyuk highlighted that gap on Twitter by sharing screenshots of the prize cash from two Tour 500 stage tournaments – a single men’s and just one women’s.

The figures demonstrate that the prize money for winning this year’s ATP Halle 500, a men’s event, is $418,000, though the prize cash for winning last year’s WTA Berlin 500, a women’s event, was just $58,000 – an 87% variation.

“Are we definitely that bad?” wrote Kostyuk together with the photographs.

 

Tennis reporter Ben Rothenberg was brief to position out that the prize funds for this year’s Berlin 500 had risen to $98,000 – chopping the hole concerning the two tournaments to 77%.

But he additional that Kostyuk was ideal to stage out the distinction and that the shell out gap in between men’s and women’s tournaments is continue to “increasing considerably.”

At previous month’s Italian Open up in Rome, an Masters 1000 tournament that has each a male and feminine attract, British reporter Catherine Whitaker highlighted a related problem.

She pointed out that ladies who reached the same stage as gentlemen in their respective tournaments would gain significantly less, most notably the winners.

The winner of the men’s event, Novak Djokovic, took residence $877,000 though the winner of the women’s match, Iga Swiatek, won only $338,000.

“Rome prize funds next week,” she mentioned. “Identical details, identical standing, identical stage. The only matter that would make this bearable is if Taylor Swift wrote a track about it.”

 

When there stays a spend hole in between ATP and WTA tournaments of the exact degree, tennis’ 4 Grand Slams pay out males and females equivalent prize dollars.

Tale proceeds

Pay out at the Slams was unequal until finally Billie Jean King fashioned the Women’s Tennis Association in 1973 and productively demanded the US Open up shell out its male and feminine gamers the exact same.

The Australian Open up did the very same in 1984 (though it did revert its choice concerning 1996 and 2000), whilst the French Open up and Wimbledon followed accommodate in 2006 and 2007 respectively.

Put together Masters occasions, these kinds of as Indian Wells and the Miami Open, also pay out the very same to males and women.

Before this 12 months, tennis superstar Serena Williams told CBS News that she thought the athletics planet was generating constructive methods toward equality in gender shell out, but that this sort of things “consider time.”

“You just won’t be able to anticipate factors to modify right away,” she explained. “I like that persons are setting up to realize that women of all ages do ought to have equivalent shell out and they deserve the exact same that a male receives.”

Read through the first article on Insider