TMB wrote:

tolman wrote: As I said, its a personal one, and it's also a matter of perspective.
One perspective is that the male tickets are 50% more expensive.
One that the women's tickets are 33% cheaper.
Another is that at a 3:2 ratio, each are about 10% away from balance, in different directions.

You are playing semantic games. The point is still valid, equal work for equal reward, regardless of it being 10% or 50%, by running around the numbers as you are, can I assume you are not longer trying to be rational?

I suspect you will assume whatever you want to assume - you seem to be that kind of person.

Thing is, it isn't semantics - there really is more than one way of looking at the numbers, and you happen to have chosen the one which gives the greatest difference.
33% less is just as valid as 50% more.
And unless the women's prizes are in total more than the combined ticket and TV rights from the women's game, they are not being meaningfully subsidised by the male ticket receipts, or requiring any men to work harder to pick up some slack.
One quite easily could, and probably should consider them as two distinct competitions, possibly providing different amounts of profit for the organisers.

If you're talking business and free market, the men seem perfectly happy to turn up for the money they are being offered - the competition seems to consistently attract the very best male players in the world.
The organisers choose to have equal prize money, for the two competitions, but that's their choice.
I'm certainly not saying that they necessarily should, just that there seems no overwhelming reason why such a decision goes beyond the bounds of reason.
Bounds which it appears, in your case, are quite tightly drawn with your personal opinions as the standard everyone else should be held to.

The point in business regarding equal pay is that people doing the same job to the same standard should be paid the same regardless of gender, race, etc.
That is nothing to do with the issue of whether people doing different jobs, or the same job to different standards should be paid different amounts.

Are the organisers of Wimbledon citing equal pay legislation as the reason for having equal prizes, claiming that they are forced into it by the law?

TMB wrote:

tolman wrote: Unless the prizes are specifically stated as being a fixed share of the receipts, there is clearly going to be a point beyond which most people would say they are close enough, yet clearly that is arbitrary and subjective.

Clearly arbitrary and subjective – you said it.

Equally, claiming that prize money should relate purely to a fraction of revenue would also be arbitrary and subjective, with people simply selecting a particular 'fairness' principle which matches their prejudices.

TMB wrote:Now you are scraping the barrel. If you implemented something as arbitrary as you suggest in any scenario, business or sport, the system would collapse. Events like this, and like in business are supposed to be paidon achievement of outcomes, not effort. If a sales guy tries really hard but sells nothing, what company wants to pay him the same as the salesman who sells more but works less hard?

You're also pointing to a principle to say what is supposed to happen even though it quite blatantly doesn't happen for a large number of people, with buisnesses seemingly failing to collapse
Have you ever had a job?
Some jobs, it is possible to pay people at least partly on commission, due to the nature of their work. That is the case in some kinds of sales jobs - the company doesn't have to pay the two sales guys the same.

Quite a lot of people work in jobs where their output is hard to measure in terms of quantity or quality, or where even when differential performance is evident, there is little chance of their being paid meaningfully according to their performance.
There are outstanding teachers (state or private) who are likely to be paid little (if anything) more than average ones or even below-average ones.
There are all manner of jobs where that situation exists - nurses, all manner of not-terribly-well-paid service jobs.

Unless someone is going to work for themselves and sell their skills at piecework rates, the situation in careers like engineering can be similar - someone twice as 'good' or 'productive' as another is frequently unlikely to be paid twice as much.
Indeed, they may well not even be overly concerned by that - while they might dislike being paid the same as an 'average' worker* (or particularly dislike being paid the same as an idle one) simply being a grade higher with a salary higher but not radically higher may be sufficient to satisfy them.

(*that said, if there was a company they wanted to work for (for prestige or money) where they knew they would be getting paid the same as people who were (or who they thought) meaningfully inferior, they may still choose to work for that company.)

TMB wrote:Are you also suggesting people can do jobs just for the glory and not pay?

I'm suggesting that a great many people are not rational mercenaries basing their entire satisfaction with a job on being paid some fixed fraction of their [perceived] value to an organisation.
And thank fuck for that, since who really wants to work with a bunch of mercenary cunts?

For that matter, I wouldn't particularly want to work with people so dim that they assume people must do things for either one reason or another, not for a multitude of reasons.
That could get tiresome very quickly.

TMB wrote:

tolman wrote: If I go for a contract position as a programmer, I might end up working with someone who is being paid the same as me but I better than I am or worse than I am. Were I salaried, I might hope that in the long run I'd end up getting paid according to my skills, but I suspect in many places the system of rewards would be neither objective nor precise - unless I was somehow being paid piecework rates, someone who was producing 2/3 as much output as me may well be being paid the same, and I wouldn't expect normal salaried pay to be anywhere near proportional to output or generated income.

But when you knowingly apply this on the basis of gender then it is a different problem. Imagine if in a specific business we paid women the same as the men even though they consistently performed 3:2 better? I suspect your argument would not get very far.

So which businesses which do that?
And, of course the business analogy requires men and women to be interchangeable in a given job.

in the Wimbledon example, having a women's competition means the organisers can sell two competitions, two sets of tickets, provide two finalists, and likely appeal to a larger total number of spectators and viewers.
The women could not be replaced by men.
Do you have evidence that the women's competition is loss-making overall, or that the men would be better off if it didn't exist?

TMB wrote:The basic principle of equal pay for equal work is mooted as being relevant in terms of gender equity. Why not apply the same in sport?

Because the 'principle' is equal pay for equal work', not for 'unequal pay for different work'.
The women are not doing work which men could do.
Were one to cancel the women's competition and double the size of the men's one, one would have lost a championship and instead added another layer of qualifying matches at the bottom of the male pyramid which few people would be likely to watch.

TMB wrote:

tolman wrote:As I said, I'm not arguing for equality of prizes or not, simply saying that I don't see a decision to have equality at Wimbledon as being unreasonable.

Then offer some valid to support this position.

I already have.
I have said there are all manner of factors the organisers might decide to take into account or give particular weight to, and that I would personally not see their decision as unreasonable whether it was for equal prizes OR unequal prizes.
That is, that the range of 'reasonable' seems to cover more than one decision they could make.

I need no more justification for my opinion than that I see no reason to judge someone as being unreasonable in the absence of a credible argument that unreasonable is what they are being, and I have seen no such argument.

I am not going to narrow my idea of what is reasonable as a result of you ignorantly banging on about a selected 'principle' which doesn't even apply to the situation in question.

Thommo wrote:When you show that the majority revenue stream at Wimbledon (that is advertising, sponsorship, TV coverage and so on) is generated by men more than women (i.e. merit) then you'll have a point...

Actually, I don't think he would.
He'd only really have a significant point if the women's competition was loss-making and the men were subsidising the women's prize money.

As long as the women's competition is providing extra funds for subsequent use compared to what there would be if there was no women's competition, given that the profits seem to be spent on supporting and promoting tennis, the organiser's perception of how their prize funding might impact on PR or their general goals seems to be potentially of great importance.

Since before prizes were equal, they were so close to equal (a 9:10 ratio or closer for the preceding 30 years), it seems unlikely that over that time the prizes were rewarded on a rational income-based basis, or by any calculation of 'objective merit', and they should still have annoyed anyone with a rigid idea of how prizes should be decided.
Though I guess they may have pleased someone who simply couldn't stand the idea of equal prizes for ideological reasons and whose ego would be satisfied by a token difference.

Thommo wrote:When you show that the majority revenue stream at Wimbledon (that is advertising, sponsorship, TV coverage and so on) is generated by men more than women (i.e. merit) then you'll have a point, but I did point out that men's golfers and women's golfers do not get paid the same, this is also true in football, cricket, rugby, snooker, darts and most other sports and not one person here has expressed even the slightest of shits about it.

Suggesting this has anything to do with equitable treatment in the armed forces or elsewhere is just a gigantic red herring.

I have noted a number of times that tennis is different to the other sports, including golf, perhaps you are not reading my posts carefully enough. I also agree that the armed forces discussion needs to stand on its own merit.

On the tennis aspect, the very fact that tickets are 50% more expensive does tell part of the story, asking to unravel every detail is so obviously impractical from where we stand. If the ticket price were the same, I would agree that the economics would tell us than $ value is equal enough, so regardless of unequal tennis playing ability, then an equal purse might be justified. Since I have shown the difference in ticket price, can you show any evidence to suggest that the $ streams are the same?

What 'evidence' do you have that the organisers should base their decisions purely on money (especially given that much of their effort and money goes to promoting and supporting tennis)?

Seems to me that all you have is an opinion.
If income is meaningfully different. evidently not an opinion the organisers seem to think is overwhelmingly important.
And if income isn't meaningfully different, not one which is actually relevant.

Depends on the sport. For example, women are far better Jello wrestlers then men. This is a known fact. Go to any biker bar, see who's in the Jello pit. I think this is because most (but not all) women are less hairy then men. Imagine a big vat of strawberry Jello with armpit hair in it. Now imagine it with biker men armpit hair. Not a pretty thought, is it?

I just checked to see what sort of vacuum we have. It's a "Shark". I had no idea, because I'm not really suited for vacuuming. Or ironing, or doing laundry. If vacuuming, ironing and doing laundry were competitive sports then women would be better at it than I am. However, if drinking beer were a competitive sport I'd do pretty well at it. I'd certainly try to turn pro, get a sponsor and maybe design a line of clothes. Well, actually I'd get a woman or a gay man to design the clothes, because I'm not suited for that either.

tolman wrote:
I suspect you will assume whatever you want to assume - you seem to be that kind of person.

No prizes on this site for making personal comments that add no value, but they reflect back on your value as a person and the lack of substance in your argument.

tolman wrote:
Thing is, it isn't semantics - there really is more than one way of looking at the numbers, and you happen to have chosen the one which gives the greatest difference.
33% less is just as valid as 50% more.

I did not suggest either was better or worse, both of them are significant in any context, my position works with both numbers – ie. They are statistically significant.

tolman wrote:
And unless the women's prizes are in total more than the combined ticket and TV rights from the women's game, they are not being meaningfully subsidised by the male ticket receipts, or requiring any men to work harder to pick up some slack.

Who suggested this argument? Noone suggested the men subsidise the women, just that they bring in bigger dollars based upon the information presented. The question here is around equality of effort and reward, not by men needing to carry slack for women etc.

tolman wrote:
One quite easily could, and probably should consider them as two distinct competitions, possibly providing different amounts of profit for the organisers.

You are stating the obvious. There is no doubt they provide different levels of profit and are different competitions, just as the doubles game is different from singles. Once again making this statement does not change the fundamental sexism and favouring of female contestants by paying them an equal amount when they are lesser players.

tolman wrote:
If you're talking business and free market, the men seem perfectly happy to turn up for the money they are being offered - the competition seems to consistently attract the very best male players in the world.

So what? How does this fact change the value provided to the competition by men versus women, and the fact they get equal purse money? Society has no issue when sexism favors women, even the men who are being discriminated against. If it were men being offered an advantage in this way, there would be mush gnashing of teeth.

tolman wrote:
The organisers choose to have equal prize money, for the two competitions, but that's their choice.

You are abdicating by taking this tack. In fact Wimbledon officials fought this for a while and tried to avoid coughing up more money, but the accusations of unfairness and sexism eventually wore them down, so they bowed to political pressure.

tolman wrote:
The point in business regarding equal pay is that people doing the same job to the same standard should be paid the same regardless of gender, race, etc.
That is nothing to do with the issue of whether people doing different jobs, or the same job to different standards should be paid different amounts.

How is it possible for argue a principle that says one should be paid the same for performing the same work, and also having a principle that says its OK to pay someone the same for doing les work. These principles are incompatible.

tolman wrote:
Are the organisers of Wimbledon citing equal pay legislation as the reason for having equal prizes, claiming that they are forced into it by the law?

I have no idea, why raise this? They buckled to political pressure from female players lobby who had managed to get all the other grand slam tournaments to pay equally.

tolman wrote:
You're also pointing to a principle to say what is supposed to happen even though it quite blatantly doesn't happen for a large number of people, with buisnesses seemingly failing to collapse

I have no idea what you are saying here. Business in the capitalist world is not perfect, however the economic principles are clear and simple. If a business does not produce more output than its inputs, the business will cease to exist. Even in the public sector if the system consumes more than it produces, ultimately the economy will collapse. You can prop things up or compensate in some way by receiving grants but the principles do not change. I suggest you read up on Adam Smiths statement of classical economics. It is far from perfect and many people do take more than they give, and others give more than they take, but a house of cards will ultimately fall.

tolman wrote:
Have you ever had a job?

Now you are resorting to a personal attack, presumably because you don’t have an argument.

tolman wrote:
Some jobs, it is possible to pay people at least partly on commission, due to the nature of their work. That is the case in some kinds of sales jobs - the company doesn't have to pay the two sales guys the same.

You don’t say? Most sales jobs, even some technical jobs pay commission, others through bonus, others a percentage of profit made. Some are paid commission only, and its not possible to pay everyone exactly according to their contribution but the principle is still the target.

tolman wrote:
Quite a lot of people work in jobs where their output is hard to measure in terms of quantity or quality, or where even when differential performance is evident, there is little chance of their being paid meaningfully according to their performance.

Agreed, but this is different to making a policy that says people do not have to produce more than they get paid, or line up exactly to everyone else. Besides that, since you are arguing this line, one can use it to undermine the feminist demand for equal work and equal pay. If you are going to argue a point, try one that does not collapse both sides of the argument.

tolman wrote:
There are outstanding teachers (state or private) who are likely to be paid little (if anything) more than average ones or even below-average ones.

Agreed, but most commercial organisations have performance reviews specifically to se if employees are benefitting or costing the organisation. If a business does not operate at a profit, ultimately people will not invest their money.

tolman wrote:
Unless someone is going to work for themselves and sell their skills at piecework rates, the situation in careers like engineering can be similar - someone twice as 'good' or 'productive' as another is frequently unlikely to be paid twice as much.

True, but market forces will still operate, those high performers can simply move somewhere they will get paid more, or they start their own businesses. Often they stay in the pack and cut down their productivity.

tolman wrote:
Indeed, they may well not even be overly concerned by that - while they might dislike being paid the same as an 'average' worker* (or particularly dislike being paid the same as an idle one) simply being a grade higher with a salary higher but not radically higher may be sufficient to satisfy them.

There are socialist elements in many capitalist systems, like the increasing rate of marginal taxation, and you argument still fails to address the equity issue I am raising. Once again, your line of argument could be used against the equal pay for equal work.

tolman wrote:
(*that said, if there was a company they wanted to work for (for prestige or money) where they knew they would be getting paid the same as people who were (or who they thought) meaningfully inferior, they may still choose to work for that company.)

Indeed they might, but there are more than just $ that count as rewards, however we are talking specifically about the $ rewards for mens and womens singles here, and the argument put forward by the women was to get equal money, not to get more social status. Even Maria Sharapova by virtue of her god looks probably gets apid more endorsements than any male or female in tennis. Shall we argue if this is fair or not?

tolman wrote:
I'm suggesting that a great many people are not rational mercenaries basing their entire satisfaction with a job on being paid some fixed fraction of their [perceived] value to an organisation.
And thank fuck for that, since who really wants to work with a bunch of mercenary cunts?

Almost all people want to get paid at least a decent living wage, and many would like to earn as much as possible. People buy lottery tickets because they would like to try and make money the easy way. I will ignore the misogynistic use of womens genitalia as an expletive as it objectifies and devalues womens bodies. I would have thought you would know better than this.

tolman wrote:
For that matter, I wouldn't particularly want to work with people so dim that they assume people must do things for either one reason or another, not for a multitude of reasons.

Just because we are arguing for the effect of a specific reason, you should not assume it is not multi faceted. The fact it is does not change the argument around money, partly because the equal pay for equal work lobby thinks it is important in its own right.

tolman wrote:
in the Wimbledon example, having a women's competition means the organisers can sell two competitions, two sets of tickets, provide two finalists, and likely appeal to a larger total number of spectators and viewers.
The women could not be replaced by men.

That is true, but it does not change the metrics of the argument. The same applies to singles events, or doubles events, and tennis venues can be worked in such a way to make it work very well with both genders, as does the Olympics. It does increase spectators, just as they include mens fashion with women modelling, does not mean they are equal money spinners.

tolman wrote:
Do you have evidence that the women's competition is loss-making overall, or that the men would be better off if it didn't exist?

It does not have to subsidise womens events, we are seeing if they have the same value, no argument here.

tolman wrote:
Because the 'principle' is equal pay for equal work', not for 'unequal pay for different work'.
The women are not doing work which men could do.

What do you mean the ‘women are not doing work which men could do’? So what, there is a segregated event on the basis of gender, so that women can be classified as elite and get to share the stage with men as equals in reward, if not in performance.

tolman wrote:
Were one to cancel the women's competition and double the size of the men's one, one would have lost a championship and instead added another layer of qualifying matches at the bottom of the male pyramid which few people would be likely to watch.

So what? Same applies to junior championships, you are not arguing the point.

tolman wrote:
I need no more justification for my opinion than that I see no reason to judge someone as being unreasonable in the absence of a credible argument that unreasonable is what they are being, and I have seen no such argument.
I am not going to narrow my idea of what is reasonable as a result of you ignorantly banging on about a selected 'principle' which doesn't even apply to the situation in question.

I suggest you do some economic study to see how this works and brush up on your logic. Try and set aside your preconceived ideas while you are at it.

TMB wrote:
You are stating the obvious. There is no doubt they provide different levels of profit and are different competitions, just as the doubles game is different from singles. Once again making this statement does not change the fundamental sexism and favouring of female contestants by paying them an equal amount when they are lesser players.

The only fundamental sexism is that which exists within your comment that female contestants are "lesser players."

TMB wrote:Who suggested this argument? Noone suggested the men subsidise the women, just that they bring in bigger dollars based upon the information presented. The question here is around equality of effort and reward, not by men needing to carry slack for women etc.

But I thought you made a point that you weren't talking about 'effort', but value.
And deciding what the 'value' of the competition is is up to the organisers, not you or me.

TMB wrote:You are stating the obvious. There is no doubt they provide different levels of profit and are different competitions, just as the doubles game is different from singles. Once again making this statement does not change the fundamental sexism and favouring of female contestants by paying them an equal amount when they are lesser players.

It's fundamental to the issue.
Because the competition is distinct, the women are not replaceable by men. However good a man is at tennis, he can't play in the women's competitions.
The presence of the women in their own competition is not meaningfully denying a 'better' man a chance of being a champion.

Similarly when other competitions are segregated by age or anything else.
I can run a sporting event with different competitions for under-18s, adults under 40, adults over 60 etc, and choose to give equal prizes even if in a single competition, the over 60s would never win in a single competition.
I may well choose to have equal prizes for all manner of reasons. My main aim may be the promotion of sport among all manner of people.
I may even wish to demonstrate that I don't think sport should be all about money.
I'm not sure it would be anyone else's business to tell me what I should do, or to accuse me of being 'unfair' to the 18-40 year-old men.

Clearly, there's a blurring of business and 'sporting ideals' in professional sport, yet competition organisers may well choose to lean towards the latter, whether for 'honourable' or merely 'pragmatic' reasons.

TMB wrote:

tolman wrote:If you're talking business and free market, the men seem perfectly happy to turn up for the money they are being offered - the competition seems to consistently attract the very best male players in the world.

So what? How does this fact change the value provided to the competition by men versus women, and the fact they get equal purse money?

Who are you to judge 'the value to the competition'?

TMB wrote:Society has no issue when sexism favors women, even the men who are being discriminated against. If it were men being offered an advantage in this way, there would be mush gnashing of teeth.

So which situations are there where men are being denied the 'advantage' of equal reward, and who would be gnashing their teeth were such situations changed?
Who is 'society' - everyone, or just some subset?

TMB wrote:

tolman wrote:
The organisers choose to have equal prize money, for the two competitions, but that's their choice.

You are abdicating by taking this tack. In fact Wimbledon officials fought this for a while and tried to avoid coughing up more money, but the accusations of unfairness and sexism eventually wore them down, so they bowed to political pressure.

And, as I repeatedly said, I wouldn't have judged that it was 'unfair' for them to have different prizes, since (assuming there are meaningfully different income rates which are not purely the result of their pricing decisions) there are potentially reasonable arguments for doing that as well.
It would be their choice either way, and as long as they weren't going to some clearly odd extreme (like giving greater prizes to a group who brought in less money, or having a differential greater than a difference in income), they should be allowed to weigh up various factors in their decision-making.

That the difference had essentially been at a token level for decades suggest that unless income differentials were very small, for decades they had been considering things other than money.

TMB wrote:How is it possible for argue a principle that says one should be paid the same for performing the same work, and also having a principle that says its OK to pay someone the same for doing les work. These principles are incompatible.

The first 'principle' is a statement of what should not be done, due to it being necessarily discriminatory (unfairly selective) to pay different [groups of] people differently simply due to gender, race, etc.

The second isn't really a principle at all, it's just a comment that there doesn't seem to be anything inherently unfair or immoral with being unselective regarding pay and performance.
It's not singling any person or group out for unfair treatment.

It's possible to have a business where everyone from lowest to highest is paid the same, with the reasoning behind that decision not being obviously Wrong or Immoral.
In reality, such a business may well be impractical, because skilled people are likely to be better-rewarded elsewhere and there are zero financial incentives for someone to work harder (so relying entirely on other factors to motivate people), but there seems to be no fundamental 'unfairness' involved. Were such a business to be created and to somehow survive and thrive, it would seem hard to argue that its survival was actually Wrong.
The basic problem with idealistic socialism is not a 'moral' one, but a practical one which is that in anything more than small groups, it very rarely works.

In reality, people doing the same job frequently do get paid the same even when they don't produce the same quantity or quality of output. Some of that can be an issue of poor management where productivity could be rewarded but isn't. Some of it is an issue of quantity and quality of output often being hard to measure, or where someone simply being good enough is worth about as much to the company as someone who is far better.

I have worked in jobs where I had little chance of advancement and could have worked less hard, been only as productive as some other people, and got paid the same, but did not choose to do so.
Such a situation (where one is effectively exceeding the minimum requirements for a post for no extra reward, or in a pool where 'value' is judged collectively and if one does work harder, any bonuses go equally to people who do not) can certainly be annoying, but it would be a quite different kind of annoyance to know that I was being paid less than my co-workers because of some irrelevant personal characteristic.

In the former situation, I could equalise things by simply working less hard, even if that went against my natural desires.
In the latter, the only way to get close to equalising things would be to perform below standard in proportion to my underpayment, possibly risking being replaced by someone who was working to standard, and definitely risking proving the discrimination justified.

TMB wrote:I have no idea, why raise this? They buckled to political pressure from female players lobby who had managed to get all the other grand slam tournaments to pay equally.

Or, more generally, they looked at the perceived PR costs and benefits and decided that having equal prizes was the way to go.
That the PR landscape may have been altered by people quite possibly motivated more by personal avarice than ideas of equality or concerns for women in general is a separate (if related) issue to whether the decision taken can be judged Unreasonably Wrong or the current situation Unreasonably Unfair.
I could personally take a cynical view of the motivations of the players while still seeing the decision as one I couldn't really declare Obviously Wrong.

TMB wrote:Agreed, but this is different to making a policy that says people do not have to produce more than they get paid, or line up exactly to everyone else. Besides that, since you are arguing this line, one can use it to undermine the feminist demand for equal work and equal pay. If you are going to argue a point, try one that does not collapse both sides of the argument.

Companies don't make policies saying people shouldn't produce more than they are paid to do, they simply in many cases just fail to reward people for extra quantity or quality of work at least partly because they know that some people will work harder than they absolutely need to do to justify being paid, whether in the real or vain hope of advancement or for more personal reasons like taking pride in a job well done.

You really don''t seem to understand what the 'point' actually is.

Where pay is arguably 'unfairly equal' in a given particular job it is essentially a case of some people being in situations where:
a) they could work less hard for no loss of income - essentially the company places a value of zero on all work above some threshold, irrespective of who chooses to do the work. Extra work done is a 'gift to the company'
or
b) there is a nonselective bonus system where everyone in a group benefits equally from an individual's extra work. A hard working individual is effectively doing work that some other people 'should' be doing, given the rewards.

Where there is unequal pay for the same work the company is effectively making a personal judgement and saying that one individual is of intrinsically less value than another simply because of who/what they are - that if they could magically change their irrelevant personal properties, they would end up getting paid more.

Neither is directly applicable to a situation of separate competitions, where in any given competition, rewards vary greatly even among people of very similar performance and people are not getting paid in proportion to anything - the winning male player may not be radically better on any objective measure than the person who comes fourth, and if the top four male players could be magically erased from history, the 'productivity' of the tournament wouldn't seem to be hugely affected. The men are competing for arbitrarily-chosen rewards in an artificial hierarchy, where given a re-run, the results would likely be different.
That's hardly an environment where 'fairness' is an overwhelming driving force.

TMB wrote:There are socialist elements in many capitalist systems, like the increasing rate of marginal taxation, and you argument still fails to address the equity issue I am raising. Once again, your line of argument could be used against the equal pay for equal work.

Only by ignoring the quite different underlying reasoning between:
a) considering overly-equal pay 'unfair', which is something that many people would do in various situations, and which I am quite happy to do in various situations (though generally relying on argument rather than appeal to 'principles').
and
b) considering discriminating against individuals based on irrelevant things like who they are as 'unfair'.

I'd be interested to see someone put forward a rational argument not simply to say that prizes should be different (since clearly, rational arguments in favour of that are always possible if, for example income is different), but to demonstrate that the three decades-long 9:10 ratio was objectively correct rather than being effectively arbitrary.
And, if arbitrary, how much 'more arbitrary' was having equal prizes?

TMB wrote:Indeed they might, but there are more than just $ that count as rewards, however we are talking specifically about the $ rewards for mens and womens singles here, and the argument put forward by the women was to get equal money, not to get more social status. Even Maria Sharapova by virtue of her god looks probably gets apid more endorsements than any male or female in tennis. Shall we argue if this is fair or not?

I'm not making a judgement on the merits of the women's arguments, I'm simply saying that the decision by the organisers to give equal prizes does not seem to me to be outside the bounds of reasonableness given the factors the organisers may decide to consider.
But nor would I consider the previous 9:10 ratio unreasonable as long as it wasn't more extreme than a realistic consideration of factors arguing for difference (such as different income) would justify.

TMB wrote:

tolman wrote:
Because the 'principle' is equal pay for equal work', not for 'unequal pay for different work'.
The women are not doing work which men could do.

What do you mean the ‘women are not doing work which men could do’? So what, there is a segregated event on the basis of gender, so that women can be classified as elite and get to share the stage with men as equals in reward, if not in performance.

tolman wrote:
Were one to cancel the women's competition and double the size of the men's one, one would have lost a championship and instead added another layer of qualifying matches at the bottom of the male pyramid which few people would be likely to watch.

So what? Same applies to junior championships, you are not arguing the point.

The point is that the nature of the competition means men and women are by definition not interchangeable.
That makes an attempted analogy using a hypothetical business situation where women were consistently far worse employees in a given job extremely silly, since in business there would be no obvious benefit to employing the women if they could be easily replaced with men who were demonstrably far better.
In tennis, there is a clear point in having a women's competition in addition to the men's.

TMB wrote:

tolman wrote:
I need no more justification for my opinion than that I see no reason to judge someone as being unreasonable in the absence of a credible argument that unreasonable is what they are being, and I have seen no such argument.
I am not going to narrow my idea of what is reasonable as a result of you ignorantly banging on about a selected 'principle' which doesn't even apply to the situation in question.

I suggest you do some economic study to see how this works and brush up on your logic. Try and set aside your preconceived ideas while you are at it.

As for 'preconceived ideas', I'm simply saying I don't think I can easily declare the organisers fundamentally unreasonable, nor (assuming some differential income) could I have easily done so when they had an arguably token 47.4% to 52.6% prize differential from the late 70s onwards.
What are the 'preconceived ideas' there, other than simply not considering one 'principle' to be of overriding importance?

You're the one seemingly declaring the organisers Wrong and Unfair, while appealing to a selected 'principle' and making apparently non-relevant comparisons with business.

Sendraks wrote:

TMB wrote:
You are stating the obvious. There is no doubt they provide different levels of profit and are different competitions, just as the doubles game is different from singles. Once again making this statement does not change the fundamental sexism and favouring of female contestants by paying them an equal amount when they are lesser players.

The only fundamental sexism is that which exists within your comment that female contestants are "lesser players."

Perhaps you can explain this to us all how this works, and sexism regardless, if it is an untrue statement? Since we judge players to be 'greater/better', lesser/worse' on how they score points relative to each other, indeed women, overall,would be lesser players if they had to compete against men in a non discriminatory environment. Just as we score lesser/greater in Olympic track events using a metric of time over distance, we can see that women are 'lesser' here as well. Sexist it certainly is, just like all these events, but sadly for some, its also true.

You might also take this up with all the sporting bodies that consider women to need protection from competing with men and so construct different events, this is sexism at its finest. Pity they dont apply lesser rewards as well.

Don't forget that sport is also speciesist.
If it were 'fair', in the 100m, my money would probably be on the trained cheetah.

tolman wrote:Don't forget that sport is also speciesist.
If it were 'fair', in the 100m, my money would probably be on the trained cheetah.

Sorry due to the integrity requirements of all sports there cannot be any cheeters allowed, next thing they will legalise drugs.

And here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/29744400 ('Men get more prize money than women in 30% of sports')
is a classic example of someone putting a different 'principle' ahead of common sense, and someone on the outside saying what a particular sport 'should' do irrespective of any other factors that might be involved (not just 'skill', but things like the number of men and women actually bothering to play, or realistic expectations of audiences).

And as for darts and snooker, I can see the point of a sports policy trying to encourage everyone to do things which keep them fit...

TMB wrote:Perhaps you can explain this to us all how this works, and sexism regardless, if it is an untrue statement?

Please don't delude yourself into thinking that anyone else requires an explanation here beyond yourself.

You clearly have a very negative view of women and have constructed a worldview for yourself that does not permit them to be viewed as anything but.

I expect his wife has insisted that he do the washing up. Again.

Misandry.

Shockingly ironic at that!

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:Misandry.

Oh no it isn't. It's a consequence of getting married.

He should have gone his own way.

Doubtdispelled wrote:. He should have gone his own way.

And not stopped to ask for directions!

Sendraks wrote:

Doubtdispelled wrote:. He should have gone his own way.

And not stopped to ask for directions!

Well, he could ask for directions to an mgtow website instead of this one. That would be ok.