It took more than three decades after the founding of the WTA for all four Grand Slam tournaments to agree to give the same prize money to female and male players. Now the women’s tour is pledging to make sure its athletes also get identical paychecks at some other top-tier events in the coming years.
The St Petersburg, Florida-based WTA on Tuesday announced that it is revising its season calendar and rules about which players must enter certain tournaments, while also setting up what it called a “pathway to equal prize money.”
The plan is to have matching payouts for women and men across all rounds of singles at the joint WTA-ATP 1000 and 500 events — the two levels below the four Slams — by 2027, and to make sure that single-week WTA-only 1000 and 500 events that are being played at the same time, but at different sites, as their ATP-only 1000 and 500 equivalents are offering the same money as those counterparts by 2033.
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“Players that say: ‘Why do we have to wait?’ are right, 100 percent, but it can’t happen tomorrow. We can’t change this overnight, but I’m very excited that we have a plan now — not to just sit and talk about this and hope that somebody will help us do the right thing that’s appropriate and deserving for these players,” WTA chairman and CEO Steve Simon said. “We’re going to make it happen.”
Simon said the additional money would come from incremental boosts by the tournaments themselves and from revenue projected to arrive from broadcast, data and sponsorship rights via WTA Ventures, the tour’s commercial enterprise that launched in March.
“Women’s professional sports don’t receive the same level of compensation for those rights as men’s professional sports do, which is why you see lower prize money paid or contracts [given] across all women’s sports versus those of men. That’s just an economic reality,” Simon said, adding that the aim is to boost funds available for players “by increasing the value of the asset and by creating new revenue streams.”
All changes would need to be approved by the WTA Board of Directors in August, something the tour expects to happen.
The proposals include increasing the number of 1000 tournaments to 10, with events in Beijing (2024), Cincinnati (2025) and Canada (2025) expanding to two weeks with larger fields; new rules to boost participation by leading players in the biggest events; and making singles rankings based on best 18 results — not just the best 16 — plus the WTA Finals.
One example of the sort of pay discrepancy going on currently: When Iga Swiatek won last year’s Internazionali BNL d’Italia, she received a little more than 330,000 euros (US$360,535), which was less than half of the roughly 835,000 euros that Novak Djokovic earned for winning the men’s title.
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