Talk about bad timing! On Equal Pay Day, Wimbledon announces it's still going to pay male players more than females. Love-30. That is, Wimbledon 0-Venus Williams 30, if Williams goes ahead with a possible boycott—or, shall we say, girl-cott?
Guess it wasn't luddite enough that Wimbledon, played in the same country where the women's movement launched in the mid-19th century, remains the only grand-slam tourney without equal prizes for champions of both genders. But tournament managers insisted on announcing their decision to pay the men's champion 655,000 pounds to the women's 625,000 (approximately $1.2 million to $1.1 million) yesterday, on the day American women's rights advocates call "Equal Pay Day."
Wimbledon's justification: Women play best-of-three set matches; men play best-of-five.
What's Equal Pay Day, you ask? It's the day the National Organization for Women identified at its founding in 1966 as "the day when women's average earnings finally catch up with the amount men earned on average in the previous calendar year alone."
NOW claims that four decades hence, "the gap remains wide, and progress has slowed to a crawl. Now, women working full time year-round are paid only about three quarters as much as men, and African-American women and Latinas receive even less."
Reader Comments