Employers need to serve an ace on equal pay or face crashing out, warns Clinton Wingrove
Last Sunday, we celebrated Andy Murray emulating Fred Perry's 1936 Wimbledon win; another British winner.
And given that the female Grand Slam winner, French player Marion Bartoli, pocketed the same prize fund, I guess we should also be revelling in the achievement of equal pay at Wimbledon.
However, writing in The Tennis Space in April this year, Simon Chambers controversially asked: “….why should they [women] be paid the same when they are not putting in as much effort?”
The general argument goes that for a woman an exhausting three-set match is just as much effort as playing a full five sets is for a man.
In 1973 Billie Jean King accepted a ‘winner takes all’ $100,000 challenge and then beat American Bobby Riggs in the best-of-five-sets match to prove a point; and, the fight for equal pay began.
But was Billie Jean King representative of female tennis?
Bartoli’s fastest serve was 106 mph against Murray’s 131; she won five of 13 breakpoints against his seven of 17; and the list goes on. And, do we really only want one tournament? Let’s just agree that equal pay is more sporting.
Alternatively, we could differentiate between:
- Demands of the job – ensure that the men and the women play precisely the same game, playing each other in the same tournament; perhaps even handicap each player based on physical strength and speed?
- Pay for the effort expended – establish a measure of calories consumed as a percentage of what is normally needed?
- The output – some algorithm of aces, break-points won, games won, forced errors etc?
- Value of the output – pay the men or the women for the percentage of the profit that they generate. Or, perhaps the public should vote after the two matches have been played and determine the percentage each gets?
Ridiculous? I don’t think so. The above reflects complexity of the issue. And many businesses are affected by it.
We recently saw the headline, “Dumfries and Galloway equal pay case victory”. This is only one in a growing line of cases. I think we are facing a perfect storm that will rain off business, not Wimbledon.
Organisations must address the issue of equal pay head-on with rigorous methods for determining the demands that jobs make of their incumbents, the effort that has been put in, the results that were achieved and the value of those results.
But, let’s not forget that knowing the value of the job - and even knowing the value of the effort expended - will not produce greater performance.
Remember well, that neither Murray nor Bartoli celebrated winning the money.
As they said, the real incentive was to be part of something exceptional; the Wimbledon ‘experience.’
Over a certain amount, the money became an issue mainly for the spectators; the real incentive for the participants was being part of something truly magical.
Equal pay and performance related pay and incentives have a long way to go before they will drive such historic performance.