New York City is home to the US Open, and to the arena of last month’s historic victory of Rafael Nadal. It is the biggest tennis tournament of the year, and if you have a chance to go to Flushing next year, go!
As much as I had a great time watching Youzhny and Wawrinka fight in a dramatic five-setter for a spot in the men’s semifinals, I also wondered how it is possible that men and women share the same prize money for this tournament and all tennis grand slams in general. It is nonsense!

I don’t understand how Kim Clijsters, the winner of this year’s women’s title, won as much as Nadal. If any economic logic was followed then women would win less. The women’s tournament is not as attractive to sponsors and to the public. Following an RU Classifieds email, it took ten minutes for a postdoc to sell her tickets to the men’s quarter finals, and she then had to send another email to stop all the requests. On the other hand, another RU member had to offer a $40 discount to sell two tickets to the women’s semifinals. For the same reason, the men’s final is on a Sunday, as opposed to a Saturday night, and the tickets for each final are not at the same price. At the time of this article’s publication, the us Open ticketing website was not accessible anymore, but tickets for the women’s final of the Australian Open, which is the next tennis grand slam, are $50 cheaper than for the men’s final for an adult seat ($289.90 versus $339.90).

The main reason for this economic difference is that women’s tennis is just not as good of a show. First, it is shorter. If you paid to see Clijsters win, you saw a 6/2, 6/1 victory in exactly one hour. The lucky few who had tickets for the last day saw Nadal beat Djokovic in a thrilling three-hour and 45-minute battle (6/4, 5/7, 6/4, 6/2). And this is not a rare phenomenon. If we take the last ten grand slam finals, the women’s final went only once to three sets (2010 Australian Open), whereas there have been four five-set and one four-set finals on the men’s side. I prefer not to give too many details on the actual rallies and the number of unforced errors or double faults.

If the media and the public recognize a difference in the quality of the show, then why should the prize money be the same? We can’t even say that men and women have the same merit to win their respective tournaments. It is less competitive for a woman to enter and win the US Open, as more men play tennis around the world. It is difficult to obtain data from the USTA (us tennis association), but to give an example, in France, 76.8% of the tennis players with a club membership are men. And Kim Clijsters illustrates this difference of overall level: she won the 2009 tournament just two months after coming back from a two-year retirement! Such a dream-story is not realistic on the men’s side. For example, Juan Martin del Potro (2009 winner) had to forfeit before the tournament because he only had two months of training after recovering from a wrist injury.

So why is tennis different than other sports such as soccer, basketball, or hockey, in the sense that men and women win the same prize money?