As one of the few men working in HR, I thought I would raise the question of equal pay, specifically regarding the increase in prize money for the very deserving women players at Wimbledon.
 
The question I would like to raise to the HR community is as follows: would HR managers be happy to promote equal pay policies in the work place when a man is expected to achieve 33% more in order to successfully deliver an outcome and should women be expected to receive 50% more pay for the same result, with less effort?

Men have to win three sets per game and win a total of 21 sets over the tournament while the women players need to win two sets and a total of 14 sets to be champion. This excludes fifth sets which do not have a tie-breaker for men and can continue for some time (as seen with Tim Henman recently).
 
The pay scales effectively mean that men will earn £33,333,33 per set won and women will earn £50,000.00 per set won.

I know women will state that they have been underpaid for years in the work place, however two wrongs etc…

Hi Gary

I think that's a really interesting question.  My first question in response would be is there any reason why female tennis players can't be required to play the same number of sets as male players?  If it's a question of physical differences, could we change the rules so that men only have to win 2 sets as well?  Would that make it fairer?  Or would it cause even more problems?  Is there a bigger picture here, for example do women players tend to have shorter careers/career breaks because they have children, so earning less over the course of their careers, which may lead some people to think they should be paid more proportionally for the sets they have to win?  I don't know enough about tennis to be able to answer these questions - what do you think?

In the workplace, I think it would be a difficult one to judge, especially as there are now many jobs where there are few "hard" indicators of someone's output (HR included!).  Where salary is related to performance, for example, behaviour and comptencies can now weigh as much as output, so there could be a case for someone (regardless of gender) being paid more for actually doing or producing less.

 Equal pay is such a tricky area, I'd welcome any more thoughts you have on this.