"Women tennis players do NOT earn the same amount of prize money as men": Tara Moore

Tara Moore has said that female tennis players do not earn as much in prize money as their male counterparts.

The 29-year-old who is currently ranked 399th in the world, took the example of the prize money at the Dubai Tennis Championships.

I really hope people read this and let it all sink in; women do NOT earn the same amount of prize money as men.

Jelena Ostapenko won her fifth WTA singles title in Dubai by beating Veronika Kudermetova in the final. The Latvian earned $104,180, which is lesser than what a semifinalist will earn in the men's singles competition despite both tournaments being of the same level (ATP 500 and WTA 500).

The men's singles champion in Dubai will receive $523,740, which is much higher than that of the women's singles champion. The men's singles runner-up receives $282,300 while the women's runner-up gets $64,800.

There are still a few tournaments which do not have equal pay for men and women

There are still some tournaments who do not pay male and female players equally

Tournaments that pay men and women equally like the Grand Slams and the top tier competitions (ATP Masters 1000 and WTA 1000) do exist. However, the same cannot be said for other tournaments in the lower tiers of the tour. However, there's still some top tier tournaments that don't have the same prize money. Rome, a Masters event, for example, distributes the same number of points but has around €1 million less in overall prize money.

Last year, Ashleigh Barty was the highest earner on the WTA tour, pocketing $3,945,182 in prize money but it was less than half of what Novak Djokovic, the highest earner on the ATP tour earned. The Serb pocketed $9,100,547. It's important to note, however, that Djokovic won three slams against Barty's one. All of that being said, Daniil Medvedev and Alexander Zverev also earned a lot more than the Australian did and Zverev did not win a Slam.

Even if we look at years before the pandemic, Barty's 2019 earnings ($11,307,587) were less than that of Rafael Nadal who pocketed $16,349,586.

Back in 2019, Victoria Azarenka spoke out on gender inequality in tennis, to which Nadal responded by saying that tennis is fairer to both genders compared to other sports.

"It doesn’t matter the prize money, or equal prize money or not, that’s your debate it’s not our debate," Nadal said. "It’s interesting that you are always debating on equal prize money in tennis when we are probably the only sport in the world where we are almost equal prize money in most of the events.

"So I don’t know why you don’t debate about football, basketball, about all the other important sports that women are miles away from the men. You always debate here, in our sport, when we support more the women tour than any other sport in the world.

"So I’m a little bit tired thinking about we are against the girls. No, not at all. Another thing is who sells more, who sells less, that is another debate, but it’s not about men or women it’s about persons and that’s all. We are the same, somebody deserve more and other ones deserve less.

"If you are in the same company as another man, and I am doing better in my job than the other man, I have to win more than the other. It doesn’t matter if it’s a girl or man and I’m a little bit tired about this debate all the time."

Pay towards women in tennis has improved a lot lately, with several tournaments paying them as much as the men. However, there are still other competitions who have not followed suit. It will be interesting to see if there is more talk about this in the future from the tennis community.