Moore’s sexism highlights tennis’ male gaze

By MATT JOHNSON,
sports editor

Another week, another controversy for what is becoming a worthwhile candidate for Serial: Season Three – the 2016 tennis season.

The year began with shocking accusations that many top 50 players players were involved in match fixing, followed with Maria Sharapova outing herself for doping and building up to the coach of the Dutch No.1 player being charged last month with murder.

Given all the drama, it's not too surprising that we then found ourselves revisiting to the all-too-familiar topic of sexism. And boy, this incarnation of the familiar debate was a doozy.

Sexist diatribes have recently become the realm of a handful of tennis administrators and ATP players. However, the now-former Indian Wells CEO Raymond Moore’s public brashness on the women’s game was outrageous.

The CEO of a tournament that dubs itself the "fifth Slam" openly declared that women tennis players “ride on the coat-tails of the men”.

“If I was a lady player, I'd go down every night on my knees and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal were born, because they have carried the sport,” he said.

Fresh from winning his third Indian Wells crown, World No.1 Novak Djokovic fanned the flame weighing in on issues of spectatorship, increasing men’s prizemoney and women’s hormonal balances. This did little to quell tensions.

Condemnation from past and present WTA players and backpedalling aside, the saga reinforces an uncomfortable truth about tennis: the sport's male-oriented foundation still permeates through perceptions and structures surrounding the women’s game.

At the uppermost echelons of the sport, the three guiding organisations – the Association of Tennis Professionals, Women’s Tennis Association and the International Tennis Federation – have boards with remarkable gender imbalances.

The ATP does not have a single female voice. This imbalance is amplified by the WTA's and ITF’s reluctance to promote equivalent numbers from both sexes to their boards. The WTA has five men and two women, while at the ITF – which oversees the Davis Cup, Fed Cup and Olympic events – it's 13 to three in favour of the men.

Former WTA chief executive Stacey Allaster, who stepped down from the role late last year, was outspoken on the importance of ending gender bias in tennis administration in the wake of her resignation.

"There are men in leadership positions, and we need them to make those smart business decisions, that they should diversify their leadership teams, their boards, to have men and women of different backgrounds to drive economic growth. That takes smarts. It takes guts. It takes courage. And it takes effort," she told The Globe and Mail.

Under her guidance, the tour expanded aggressively into Asia by bringing its keynote event to the continent and signing a $525 million media rights deal – the largest in the history of women’s sport. 

Her replacement? The former Indian Wells tournament director Steve Simon.

Let’s go further and analyse the prevalence of women in WTA tournament director roles, a position Moore also held at the time of his resignation.

Tournament directors, the public face of any professional event, serve as one of the primary contact points for players. Men run 47 of the 61 WTA-only and combined events world-wide, meaning women hold these positions less than a quarter of the time.

Notably, the year-end championships in Singapore – the highest-paying non-Grand Slam tournament – boasts Melissa Pine as tournament director. It’s great, but it only goes a small way to fixing the wider disparity.

And out of the current top 20 women’s players on tour, not one has a full-time female coach in their entourage, and there are very few in a part-time capacity.

See the trend?

A "boy’s club" mentality as THE dominant discourse guiding the direction of women’s sport does not provide for the most welcoming of settings for women to take a stand, particularly on debates such as the one this month.

As WTA player Nicole Gibbs, who spoke out against Moore’s comments via social media, put it: “I had multiple girls in the locker room come up to me and say, 'Hey, I saw your tweets last night, your messages, but my coach told me not to get involved', or "I didn't think it was smart for me to get involved'.”

Given this climate of silence, it is up to organisations overseeing these athletes to rectify the status quo.

Organisations with a lack of diversity on their boards find this demanding, particularly in cases where they are pitted in direct competition with a men’s association.

Case in point: more than half of the events on the WTA calendar yield a total prize pool of US$500,000 or less, compared to just seven of the ATP’s 66 annual events.

Looking at the upper end of the spectrum, the nine men’s Masters tournaments command prizemoney in excess of $3 million, highlighting the strength of a clearly defined upper-tier series. This cohesiveness, brought together by slick marketing campaigns and sponsorship arrangements, is something the WTA – with its confusing Premier Mandatory, Premier 5 and Premier categories – lacks.

When women take part in combined events alongside men, they are largely considered supplementary as they play a lower category of tournament. Court allocation and scheduling, number of matches broadcast – particularly in recent years at events like the Miami Open – the manner in which women have been dealt with by media and media bureaucracy are all hot topics of discussion.

Which brings us back to Moore.

His comments reflect a dying yet vocal minority who consider the strength of a quartet of male players to be reflective of the sport at large.

The truth is it's all relative. Retired former world No.2 Li Na surely commanded more attention in China than any other player after her French Open triumph. Her success paved the way for the WTA and ATP to channel their energies towards expanding into the Chinese mainland.

Comparison is counterproductive. Attacks on the women’s game do little to strengthen the sport as a whole and the resulting infighting won't eradicate still-existing examples of inequality.

Male figureheads in both men’s and women’s tennis have the potential to develop a healthy co-existence through their actions and words. Only time will tell if this most recent saga is a catalyst for such change.