The earnings gap between male and female athletes has, for quite a long time, had very little to do with sexism.The short answer re tennis is that Billie Jean King, first and foremost, led other female players in SPEAKING UP loudly and FIGHTING very hard for equality of pay. :yes:
(It's unfortunate that BJK's pioneering efforts apparently have faded into obscurity. I hope that young female tennis players have not forgotten her commitment to making the sport better for all women.)
I know it's somewhat awkward to say, but the truth is, even in Billie Jean King's time, it had less to do with a bunch of male chauvinists who wanted to pay women less as a matter of evil principle, and more about the fact that the women's matches did not fill seats with butts as well as men's matches, and that also went for television ratings. This is, in fact, still true today in tennis.
In golf, it is even worse. The plain facts are that ratings for LPGA events are a pitiful fraction (a very small fraction) of that for PGA events.
The reality that no one wants to recognize in all of the ruckus that at times borders on self-righteousness is that women, as a consumer segment, simply have not shown the level of interest in sports that routinely marks the male segment, and therefore do not support female athletes by buying tickets and watching the events, and boosting Q ratings. The female demographic, if I were to hazard a guess, spends vastly more time, effort, and dollars in support of their favorite movie, television, and music stars, than they do on female athletes (present company excepted, of course).
The reality is that somewhere down the line, someone has to sell something, whether it be tickets or advertising slots or consumer products, in order for money to wind up in the athlete's pocket, Who wants to bet me that if one did an analysis of the contribution of athletes to commercial revenue generation, that one would find a fairly precise correspondence with their incomes, irrespective of gender?
A few generations ago, a very underage Shirley Temple was one of the highest-paid stars in Hollywood. Under current PC thinking, one would have guessed that she would have been shafted, seeing as how she was both a minor and a female. Not the case. All the moguls cared about was that her saccharine offerings were box-office hits. And as I mentioned in another thread, Oprah, a somewhat portly African-American female who would never be confused with Beyonce, has transcended performing and become a genuine billionaire media mogul in her own right.
Let's have the gumption to look the truth in the eye.