Wimbledon: just 6 women’s players have a female coach. The WTA tour is trying to serve up change
- Tennis legend Billie Jean King and others consider this a reflection of the sort of entrenched bias that prevented women from advancing in other fields
- Not only tennis: a 2019 study found that more than 13 million girls and women played organised football, but only 7 per cent of coaches worldwide were women
On the day of the Wimbledon singles draw, Billie Jean King and other founding members of the women’s professional tennis tour gathered 8km (5 miles) away at a London hotel to mark the 50th anniversary of a meeting that led to the formation of today’s WTA.
That long-ago moment was prompted by frustration at being paid far less in prize money than the sport’s male athletes. For all the progress since in that area, there remains an aspect of tennis in which gender equity is nowhere near being achieved: coaching.
Of the 128 women in the singles bracket at Wimbledon, which ends this weekend, just six work with a female coach – roughly 5 per cent. All the coaches for men were men.
“Terrible. Extremely disappointing,” King, the International Tennis Hall of Fame member and rights advocate, said when asked about the scarcity of female coaches.
“It’s about society, absolutely. You have to see it to be it. So if you don’t see a woman up there as a coach, it doesn’t even cross your brain. How do we get the top players to hire them? We’ve got to solve the problem.”
King and others in the sport consider that a reflection of the same sort of entrenched bias that has prevented women from advancing in all manner of other fields – and the WTA is making efforts to change that through an initiative that pairs aspiring coaches with established ones.