"Would you want your daughter or your wife to be paid less?" - Venus Williams reminisces Wimbledon board meeting where she advocated for equal pay

Venus Williams recently reminisced about how she had advocated for equal prize money sharing between men and women at the Major tournaments back in 2005.

Speaking during the inaugural US Open Champions of Equality event, the 7-time Major winner revealed that she was once invited to an important board meeting at the 2005 Wimbledon Championships to make her case for pay parity.

She came up with a rather simple analogy, which eventually effected a major change in tennis history.

"It was year after year after year since the Open Era that this was going on," Venus Williams said. "I was arriving at the finals. Every year they have this meeting with the Grand Slam Committee. At that point, I went into this room and I asked everyone to close their eyes. I said, Now that your eyes are closed, you don't know if that person next to you is a man or a woman, but everyone's heart beats the same way."

"Would you want your daughter or your sister or your mother or your wife or a loved one that was a woman to be paid less? Then I left."

She added that it was her mother Oracene Price who had taught her how to stand up for women's rights.

"When you stand up for what's right, that's what my mom was all about, she is about that, and I learned that from her, she's really just an amazing woman. Because of her I think that's why I spoke out, because my mom said, There's something wrong, you stand up for it. That's really where it came from."

Venus Williams had written a strongly worded letter in 2007 to successfully bring pay parity at the Major tournaments

Venus Williams won the Wimbledon Championships five times in her career

While Venus Williams made some plausible points during the meeting, Wimbledon and the other Majors still refused to cut down the prize money gap between the ATP and WTA players for the next few years.

It was in 2007 that the American decided that enough was enough. She subsequently guest-authored an opinion piece in the London Times, which sent ripples across the tennis world. Here is an excerpt from the piece:

“I feel so strongly that Wimbledon’s stance devalues the principle of meritocracy and diminishes the years of hard work that women on the tour have put into becoming professional tennis players. The message I like to convey to women and girls across the globe is that there is no glass ceiling. But, my fear is that Wimbledon is loudly and clearly sending the opposite message."

Venus Williams' move to voice her opinion in print media paid off soon after, as Wimbledon became the first Major tournament to offer equal prize money to both male and female players in 2007.

The rest of the Major tournaments followed suit soon after, eulogizing the 7-time Major winner as an important figure in the fight for equal pay in sports.