Male winner of 2022 National Bank Open will take home twice as much as the female champion. Why?

The ongoing National Bank Open tennis tournaments in Canada has brought the equal pay issue in sports back to centre court.

The world’s best tennis players are currently competing in Toronto and Montreal in the tournament previously known as the Rogers Cup.

The total purse for the men’s 2022 National Bank Open in Montreal is $5,926,545 (all figures in US currency), more than twice as much as the women’s prize money in Toronto at $2,697,250.

That means the male winner will earn $915,295, compared to the female champion at $439,700.

This gap occurs even though prize money at the tennis majors has been equal since 2007. At Wimbledon, both the men’s and women’s singles champion won $2.5 million this year. But the inequity at the National Bank Open is far from unusual at non-majors around the world.

“This pay gap is an example of a taken-for-granted (problem) in the women’s game,” said Katie Lebel, an assistant professor at the University of Guelph who specializes in gender equality in sports and brand management.

She said factors hindering earning potential for women in sports are “deeply institutionalized and widely accepted,” and that’s why change is very slow.

Lebel points out that the male winner at the National Bank Open gets 1,000 ranking points on the ATP Tour, while the WTA only awards 900 ranking points to its champion in Toronto.

“From an institutional standpoint, fewer points has typically meant a smaller purse,” she told the Star in an interview.

“If an intentional decision were made to provide women with a similar number of 1,000-point events, it would clear the way to rationalize the equal distribution of prize money,” Lebel added. “From here, we would just need the kind of bold leadership necessary to follow this vision through.”

Tennis Canada acknowledges the significant gap and is “taking a leadership role” in addressing this specific issue as well as gender equity broadly, spokesperson Stefen Hakim said in a statement to the Star.

The gap is mainly a result of how the two tournaments are structured and how much revenue they generate.

“We earn over 10 times more global broadcast revenue from ATP Media than we do from WTA Media,” Hakim said. “This has nothing to do with domestic and global broadcast ratings which are comparable between our events. It is a function of the broadcast agreements.”

The other part of the equation is that the WTA has four mandatory WTA 1000 tournaments and National Bank Open is not one of them. The ATP has nine mandatory Masters 1000 events and they include the National Bank Open.

“When a tournament is mandatory, it is guaranteed that the top players will participate, thus increasing the opportunity to pre-sell more locally generated revenue, such as ticket sales and corporate partnerships,” Hakim said.

Vijay Setlur, a sports marketing expert and York University professor, said it’s a matter of time before the National Bank Open follows the examples of other sports entities across the globe in awarding equal pay to women and men. Wimbledon and the U.S. Soccer Federation both received heavy criticism over unequal pay before they changed course, he said.

“It’s just a direction that we’re moving into and anybody that does not follow that trend becomes an outlier,” he said.

Aside from these precedents, equal pay movement is also being influenced by many sponsors who want to see gender equity and fair treatment of women reflected at the organizations where they invest, he added.

At the gender equity in sports conference, tennis legend Billie Jean King told the audience that women must be encouraged to always aim higher, not underestimate themselves, and think big.

“Do not be happy with the crumbs. You want the cake, the icing and the cherry on top,” she said, emphasizing the importance of increasing value for women sports.

“If you can generate dollars, you’ll always have a job.”

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