Denis Shapovalov has managed to fully immerse himself in the gender gap issue in tennis, thanks to his girlfriend Mirjam Bjorklund, a player who currently occupies the 145th position in the WTA ranking. Shapovalov explained his piint of view: “When I first started on the Tour, I naively assumed that men and women were treated equally.
Then my girlfriend Mirjam opened my eyes. Last year she qualified for a WTA 250. I told her: great, at least you will earn 7,000 dollars just for being in the draw. Denis but where do you live, she replied: if I get 100 dollars, that’s a lot.
The gender gap doesn’t make sense, it’s totally unfair and it shouldn’t exist. If you’re a woman, you have little chance of survival in the world of tennis. Yet girls fill stadiums, have excellent television ratings, are perfect testimonials for brands: they have nothing less than men.
Last year, a men’s and women’s tournament were played simultaneously in Washington. Yet to win the first round match, a tennis player earned $14,280 and a female tennis player only $4,100. It’s less than a third! I lost the ATP 250 final in Seoul last year: I took 100,000 dollars.
What happened to Billie Jean King’s gender battles?”
The Gender Gap between men’s and women’s
The gender gap between the men’s and women’s Tours in the Grand Slam tournaments represented a real turning point in the world of tennis.
Wimbledon was the last Major to reach this important milestone in 2007. Participating in one of the four most important events of the Tour, however, is certainly not easy. There are many tennis players who are fighting to conquer the top 100 just to enjoy greater economic benefits.
The disparity in treatment, especially at an economic level, has widened due to the Covid-19 pandemic and is widening the gap between the tennis elite and the rest of the players even further. The situation becomes more complicated on the WTA Tour.
Excluding the Grand Slam tournaments, in fact, the sum of the prize pools of all the events that took place last year on the men’s Tour was almost 75% higher than that of the women’s Tour.
