Three-set women’s tennis at grand slams a form of sexism

Women have equal prizemoney, now they need to play five sets like the men.

Billie Jean King fought hard for equal prizemoney but not so much for five-set grand slam tennis for women.

An egregious act of sexism occurred at Wimbledon yesterday, but there was no protest about it. There was no placard-carrying crowd at the gates of the All Eng­land Club, no letters to the editor, no debate on television. The sexism did not occur once, but multiple times.

It happened when Kiki Bertens played Petra Kvitova, when Caroline Wozniacki played Zheng Saisai, when Heather Watson played Caroline Garcia. It happened when Svetlana Kuznetsova played Laura Siegemund, Jelena Jankovic played Elena Vesnina and Teliana Pereira played Camila Giorgi.

We often think of prejudice in a superficial way. We think of the n-word spoken by a racist, of the sleazy boss who sends an email to a colleague about the legs of his secretary, about the crude email exchanges that take place between assorted dinosaurs.

But these graphic expressions of prejudice are on the decline in the modern world. They are confined to a fag-end demographic, and have little influence on the life chances of so-called minority groups. What we should be far more concerned about are the prejudices that exist in open view, because these reflect the default assumptions that keep the edifice of bigotry in place.

I am talking about the Confederate flag that continues to fly outside the South Carolina State House, and the monument to those who defended slavery that continues to stand in Augusta, just a stone’s throw from the famous golf club. And I am talking about how women, in the second decade of the 21st century, an age in which we are familiar with feats of endurance and daring by females, are still asked to play tennis matches over three sets.

If you think this is a trivial issue in comparison with the Confederate flag, I invite you to consider the symbolism. Think of the girls and boys watching on TV up and down the country, and noting that at the precise moment when the third set is completed, at a time when male competitors would be steeling themselves for the most intense and compelling stage of the match, female players are expected to shake hands, smile and depart the stage.

But here is the question that strikes one most forcibly: why do female players acquiesce in this sexism? They have been vocal in calling for equal prizemoney, equal status, equal everything. But when it comes to playing over five sets, rather than three, what you might call equality of effort, something that these fine, lithe and hugely impressive athletes are perfectly capable of doing, everything seems to change.

You might almost call it hypocrisy, particularly when you factor in another aspect of “unequal treatment”: namely, that on days when the temperature is above 30.1C and where this is coupled with elevated humidity, women are permitted a 10-minute timeout between the second and third sets. This rule was created at the behest of the Women’s Tennis Association, has been adopted by the All England Club and contains a certain logic when you consider dehydration and other health hazards.

But if men are expected to play through intense heat, if they manage to do so over five full sets, the extra two at least doubling the physical and mental exertion, not to mention the reduced rest time between matches implied by this, one can at least ponder why women players, and their supporters in the media, have not been climbing the ramparts about yet another insinuation that they lack strength, lack resilience, lack staying power.

These regressive rule differences, which exist in plain sight not merely at Wimbledon, but, when it comes to the scoring system, all the grand slam events, represent an insistent form of sexism. They reduce expectations, both of women and about women, they implicitly justify other differences in treatment well beyond sport and they serve to bake 19th-century assumptions into the waking reality of a 21st-century entertainment spectacle.

It is worth remembering that when Billie Jean King created the WTA, she did so as a conscious statement of liberation. She was outraged by the peripheral nature of women’s tennis, the injustice that female students were excluded from so many college sports, the sense that the world existed under the assumption that strength and vitality were masculine attributes. “It was about changing attitudes,” she told me in an interview in 2007.

In many ways, it worked. Today, there are many positive signs across sport inspired by King’s revolution. Before the 1980s, there were no distance races for women at the Olympics; today, the most iconic British marathon runner is Paula ­Radcliffe.

Endurance events on water were once men-only affairs; today we celebrate iconic sailors such as Ellen MacArthur and Tracy Edwards. Before 2012, female boxing did not exist at the Olympics; today, Nicola Adams is one of our most visible stars.

In football, too, a sport that has long been a male bastion, women are making inspirational breakthroughs. In the early hours of today the England team will face Japan in a World Cup semi-final, a contest that will showcase the astonishing evolution that the women’s game has undertaken over the course of a single generation. Canada has proved to be a transformative month.

And this is why it is so jarring that in tennis, a sport that was once a bastion of progressive ideals, where the modern female sporting revolution was catalysed, women are being demeaned by a set of rules that should have disappeared in the 20th century, but where King’s successors are doing so little to effect change.

All it would take is a joint press conference by top players and the three-set scoring system would be confined to history. An opinion piece may also help. There almost certainly would not be the need for the threat of a boycott, still less a boycott itself. They could also call for a change to the heat rules while they were at it.

But the will for change to happen, for the symbolic levelling of the playing field with men that was supposedly of such deep importance just a few years ago, is conspicuous by its absence. It is difficult to resist the feeling that the women players are capable of talking the talk, but not walking the walk. Particularly when the temperature is above 30.1C.

The Times