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Women have long sought equal pay for equal work. Which is fair. But actually the work can fall well short of equal.

My experience with female executives has been a consistent trend of working shorter hours than their male counterparts and rushing off home to be mum while their subordinates are left to do the hard graft, meet the tight deadline and make them look good. During the day, too, plenty of family crises involving leaving early, taking an extra hour at lunchtime or every other call being a personal one of an afternoon. And the impact of the boss not giving 110% (or maybe even 80) can be profound. Because it’s just ‘the way things are’ you might not notice that much. But consider the male executive who, say, has an affair. And everyone in the office knows his mind isn’t properly on his work, and is directly impacted by that. Well that level of performance degradation can be the norm for a female exec struggling to balance work and home life.

For men, it’s the elephant in the room, but for women, such observations are often seen as sexist. Well positive discrimination is still discrimination – in this case against men. While seldom stated so categorically, this reality isn’t lost on the business world, which tends not to pay the eighty percenters as much.

On the tennis court, women now get equal prize money to the men. But they play a maximum of 3 sets instead of 5! Do women run half marathons instead of full ones? No. There’s no earthly reason I can see that a professional female player couldn’t manage a 5-setter if they needed to. In fact, to assume they can’t seems insulting – a relic attitude of the Victorian era.

The conclusion of the Australian Open last weekend nicely illustrates the disparity for the spectator. The results were greatly affected by the amount of court time each player had had. In the men’s draw, Roger Federer got to the final by beating Tsonga, who’d just got through two 5-setters back-to-back, while Andy Murray had fended off Cilic in a 4-setter. (Federer had narrowly averted a 5-setter in the quarter finals against Davydenko.) These epic battles colour the men’s game and lend significance to the final victory. Be honest – how many unforgettable women’s finals have there been?

In the women’s draw, both Serena Williams and Justine Henin picked up places in the final from 2-set matches. Williams had played one 3-setter in the 6 previous rounds and Henin 2. Their other matches were all just two sets. Williams struggles in long matches. Under men’s singles scoring, as she and Henin had one set apiece, the third set wouldn’t have been enough to get her the silverware and things would have started getting interesting.

In total, Williams played 15 sets during the tournament and Henin 16. Federer and Murray each played 22. So the girls played just 70% as many sets as the boys. Yet Williams and Federer each walk away with $2.1m. Doesn’t sound very fair to me.

*ducks for cover*

Image, right: AP