Equal money debate fallacy

G

gmatheis

Hall of Fame
Why do so many of you people focus on women playing best of 3 vs best of 5 sets when trying to argue if they deserve equal money?

The number of sets has absolutely nothing to do with how much money they deserve.

What DOES matter is ticket sales, merchandise sales, sales of broadcast rights etc...

Tennis players create an entertainment product much like an actor/actress making a movie. Their compensation should be based solely on how much money that product can bring in.

The only equality they deserve is an equal sized slice(percentage) of the pie(money) they create.

Billie Jean King said it pretty well "I never said we were as good as the men, I said we were as entertaining to watch as the men"

So whichever tour brings in more money should get paid more , and I have no problem if because of that the women get paid more than the men. Even at majors with computers being able to analyze live video today they could easily tell attendance numbers for individual matches.
 
Not to add fuel to the fire or anything, but there's only one way to find out and that is to separate the two tours. As it stands right now a good amount of tournies feature both sexes you don't know who's the main draw.
 
Clay lover said:
Not to add fuel to the fire or anything, but there's only one way to find out and that is to separate the two tours. As it stands right now a good amount of tournies feature both sexes you don't know who's the main draw.
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Sure you do, you have computers analyze the video to see how many seats are occupied during each match. Really not that hard in this day and age.
 
The two tours are separate.

Clay lover said:
Not to add fuel to the fire or anything, but there's only one way to find out and that is to separate the two tours. As it stands right now a good amount of tournies feature both sexes you don't know who's the main draw.
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The main falllacy is that prize money is pay.

The second fallacy is that prize money is directly market-related,

The slams own a monopoly. They award prize money on the basis of an internal bureaucratic calculation.

gmatheis said:
Why do so many of you people focus on women playing best of 3 vs best of 5 sets when trying to argue if they deserve equal money?

The number of sets has absolutely nothing to do with how much money they deserve.

What DOES matter is ticket sales, merchandise sales, sales of broadcast rights etc...

Tennis players create an entertainment product much like an actor/actress making a movie. Their compensation should be based solely on how much money that product can bring in.

The only equality they deserve is an equal sized slice(percentage) of the pie(money) they create.

Billie Jean King said it pretty well "I never said we were as good as the men, I said we were as entertaining to watch as the men"

So whichever tour brings in more money should get paid more , and I have no problem if because of that the women get paid more than the men. Even at majors with computers being able to analyze live video today they could easily tell attendance numbers for individual matches.
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PMChambers said:
There's a war on everything at TTW.

It's one of the more pointless arguments based on shrinking the sport rather than growing it. Why not push growth and complain about accessibility instead? There seems to be effort to make tennis hard to access.
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I joined because I thought it was a tennis board. It said "talk tennis" right in the title. Can I sue for false advertising?
 
gmatheis said:
How is it a gender war to want to pay people based on what they produce. Don't most sales jobs work like that?
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That's not what I said. It's a gender war here because every discussion becomes about gender. Every topic is reduced to a war about gender. You make up battles just so you can fight about gender.
 
I never understood the anger over equal pay. There's enough money to go around for everyone on tour. Paying the women equally isn't taking anything away from the men. What needs to happen, though, on both tours is revenue sharing. In about every other major sport, the top 500 players or so in that sport make a healthy living. It could be the same for tennis
 
Milehigh5280 said:
I never understood the anger over equal pay. There's enough money to go around for everyone on tour. Paying the women equally isn't taking anything away from the men. What needs to happen, though, on both tours is revenue sharing. In about every other major sport, the top 500 players or so in that sport make a healthy living. It could be the same for tennis
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There is clearly not enough money to go around everyone on tour

We should be taking money away from top men and women and giving them to players ranked in the hundreds.

The top players already earn a substantial amount in endorsements anyway
 
It's clear that tennis is a sport where less of the money raised as revenue goes back to all players as compared to team sports.

Even the top players are, comparatively speaking, paid poorly in terms of prize money.

jm1980 said:
There is clearly not enough money to go around everyone on tour

We should be taking money away from top men and women and giving them to players ranked in the hundreds.

The top players already earn a substantial amount in endorsement anyway
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Bartelby said:
It's clear that tennis is a sport where less of the money raised as revenue goes back to all players as compared to team sports.

Even the top players are, comparatively speaking, paid poorly in terms of prize money.
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True. The top soccer players (Ronaldo/Messi) are paid ~30 million a year from just their contract. The most a top player in tennis has ever earned from prize money in a single year is ~ 15 mill and that only occurs if they have a near perfect season which is rare while Ronaldo and Messi could have a terrible season and still get payed 30mill
 
Milehigh5280 said:
I never understood the anger over equal pay. There's enough money to go around for everyone on tour. Paying the women equally isn't taking anything away from the men. What needs to happen, though, on both tours is revenue sharing. In about every other major sport, the top 500 players or so in that sport make a healthy living. It could be the same for tennis
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I think it stems from the fact that paying them the same is sort of socialism and in the US we believe in capitalism. Why not take it a step further and pay the entire tour the same amount per match played, the winners still would get more. But people don't pay as much to see all the lower ranked people play, they want to see Serena, Sharapova, Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray etc.

And never forget I'm NOT saying pay the women less, I'm saying pay them all what they deserve based on how much they can generate.
 
Ann said:
LMAO thank you I won't leave unless I find a more woman friendly forum that's active but as far as popular, no, I've been told I'm generally hated by a large swath of the males here... although the men actually seem to be ok with me. :cool:
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Girl, don’t you ever leave! We are a dying breed in this forum. Not all men hate women, some of the best men post here as well. Unfortunately, you Will also find those who want to see women as submissive creatures and those same men believe that the kitchen is a woman’s natural habitat. If they are to decide, the only time you are supposed to open your mouth is when you’re giving a man a felatio:rolleyes:
 
Equal pay debates have no place when it's concerning over payed privileged very minority group of society.

Let's focus on the people who really need the money instead.
 
You can see which tour makes more money just from their respective web-sites. WTA's is utter garbage. Anyway, women deserve to have equal payment. It's not all about sets, especially considering both genders play the same best of 3 most of the year. Female pro athletes' training and travel expenses are exactly as high as male's.
 
gmatheis said:
Why do so many of you people focus on women playing best of 3 vs best of 5 sets when trying to argue if they deserve equal money?

The number of sets has absolutely nothing to do with how much money they deserve.

What DOES matter is ticket sales, merchandise sales, sales of broadcast rights etc...

Tennis players create an entertainment product much like an actor/actress making a movie. Their compensation should be based solely on how much money that product can bring in.
Click to expand...

Good point, I looked up Wimbledon ticket prices for 2019 finals and have to admit that I was surprised there is a difference in pricing. There has never been any empty seats on finals day when I have watched but wonder whether there would be if the Women's Final ticket prices were increased.

Saturday 13 July (WF) £185
Sunday 14 July (MF) £225
 
Clay lover said:
Not to add fuel to the fire or anything, but there's only one way to find out and that is to separate the two tours. As it stands right now a good amount of tournies feature both sexes you don't know who's the main draw.
Click to expand...

If you can find financial statements from the Roger's Cup over the years that might provide a pretty good idea. I can tell you, having worked both WTA and ATP events in Toronto, the ATP event is busier and the stadium has additional seating installed that isn't there during the WTA event.
 
Should be proportional to how many people watch/how much revenue is earned. Also, putting the womens events right before the men everytime is unfair, if people really want to watch the women they should be forced to stay up late just as often as those who have to stay up late watching the men. Its annoying to have the womens event as a “pregame” that alot of people watch because they are waiting to watch the men. Put the womens events after the mens half the time and THEN average the viewership results to see what the demand is.
 
There is no equality of outcome in tennis, so you start from the wrong premise.

The two tours are separate and are based on two distinct commercial profiles.

Slams are one event and prize money is too small a cost for organisers to worry about mapping prize money to exact market profiles.

Zoid said:
Equal pay is misguided equality. Equal opportunity is what everyone agrees on, yet for some they think it also means equal outcome.

Equal outcome never works because the incentive has been removed. I imagine women's tennis would have been more innovative if the pockets were getting lighter and they would have been forced to look at their game long and hard and try and make it more entertaining and unique from the mens - as of right now, due to the fact that technology has steered the game into a more physical/less tactical domain, the women are on unequal footing.

They are weaker, slower, and generally less fit, in a game that now values strength, speed and endurance more than ever. go figure?

If I was head of the WTA I would be steering the women's game in a complete 180 to make it the kind of tennis a niche audience craves;

encourage serve volley, promote variety with different court speeds/balls, tweak the rules to encourage players coming forward, literally anything but trying to model your game on a weaker version of the men.

Yes the men's game is far more popular right now, but people still have their complaints: matches too long, just baseline bashing, same guys winning etc etc.

I would way rather watch players like henin, suarez navarro, hingis, navratilova, and other finesse/stylish and volley styles than Milos Raonic v John Isner, or Murray v Gilles Simon - WTA - pick your battles!

Imagine two chicks serve volleying, attacking and smashing and drop shotting, everything the men's game was lacking I would push in the women's game.

THEN you have a unique product that attracts it'w own fans
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I don't think that Henin's biggest asset was her strength.

The talk about how the WTA has problems just because women are less strong physically than men are, IMO, used to avoid the elephant in the room.

8-)
 
Man of steel said:
True. The top soccer players (Ronaldo/Messi) are paid ~30 million a year from just their contract. The most a top player in tennis has ever earned from prize money in a single year is ~ 15 mill and that only occurs if they have a near perfect season which is rare while Ronaldo and Messi could have a terrible season and still get payed 30mill
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Soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Apples to oranges.
 
1. What everyone thinks about the slams stems from their own prejudice, but prize money is not an income. It is just a reward for winning an event so inequality is built into it as a principle. The best are rewarded more.

2.

3. No one has any evidence about why Slams decide on prize monies. All we know is that the total prize pool is smaller than most other sports. They certainly have never mapped prize monies to solely market criteria.

Zoid said:
"there is no equality of outcome in tennis, so you start from the wrong premise.'

- well for the slams that is 100% wrong, which is what everyone refers to when they discuss equal pay in tennis, so the fact that you made that statement to begin with is beyond me.

'the two tours are separate and based on two distinct commercial profiles'

- this is the only correct statement.

'Slams are one event (four, actually) and prize money is too small a cost for organisers to worry about mapping prize money to exact market profiles'

- This literally could not be more wrong. A tournament spends a lot of time trying to maximise profits, that is literally their goal. If they could give a champion 1 million (if that's what they deserved) instead of 3 million, the organisers certainly would worry about that Bartelby, trust me on that one. They would certainly be able to —at the very least—map out the mens and womens totals and then divide the rounds as they saw fit, and they (tournament organisers) would make more margins if they could divvy up prize money between the mens and womens tours as they deserved (read: get what they earned)
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Oh, this thread is 3 weeks old, and I am already visiting. How could I miss it?
There’s some epic war going on here since.
 
Ann said:
Why is there a constant gender war on this board?
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Because women are shallow, self-absorbed, disingenuous, soul-sucking harpies.
(obsessed with hair, shoes, pets, furnishings, landscaping, shopping, etc.)

But, other than that, they're swell gals.
 
1. Prize money is prize money. It is not an income as no one is employed. It is awarded based on merit. Coming first is important.

2. Tennis tournaments create hierarchies of talent. How they choose to structure and reward performance is arbitrary beyond rewarding those who win more than those who lose.

3. Grand slams are owned as a quasi-monopoly, co-ordinating their policies through a board of the ITF. They systematically under-reward all-players compared to team sports.

.
Zoid said:
1. Distributing money based solely on merit - excluding gender, race, age etc. etc. is the EXACT OPPOSITE OF PREJUDICE. Prize money IS an income - if you want to call your fortnightly payment Prize Money for showing up, that is fine, it is a reflection of — in a free market — how well you do compared to others. A contract you get is a prize you won in a pool of all possible employees.

There will always be hierarchies in all aspects of life because people value some things more than others, and that creates inequality - no male model is screaming 'unfair' that he doesn't get paid as much as candice swanepoel. The women's fashion industry is disproportionately bigger than the men's, therefore what female models wear will make fashion companies more money than what any male model can compete with, therefore the female models themselves that the brands rely on to market their product get paid more. The beauty of a free market is that no 'body' or group gets to decide the rules, the free market decides based on their wallets - there is literally nothing fairer than that system. 'The best are rewarded more' - you said it yourself. Would you be happy if you lost out on a job where you were better qualified, but the other applicant got it on the notion that they were male, and the company needed equal numbers of female/male employees? I hope not.

3. I'm sure grand slams don't pull numbers out of a hat and decide on them that way - there are players councils, swaths of accountants at the grand slams would work on allocations and predicted allocations over the coming years depending on tv and sponsorship details.
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