Should female players at Wimbledon be paid less?

It seems to happen every year during the Wimbledon tennis championships; some feminist-inspired female player will make the demand that women be paid the same prize money as the men. To me this sounds like bare-faced cheek! It had been said that at Wimbledon the women provide the glamour and the men provide the tennis.

I think that's it in a nutshell. Women play three sets and the men play five. Isn't it rather obvious that the men are doing a lot more work than the women? In the UK we have an Eqaul Pay Act, but it states quite clearly that it is about "equal pay for equal work".

Anywhere else, if a woman worked part time for three days, she would certainly not expect the same pay as a man who worked full time for five days. Why do some Wimbledon women have the utter gall to expect preferential treatment when they play tennis?

And the quality of women's tennis is laughable when compared with that of the men which is doubtless why more people watch TV when the men are playing than when the women are playing.

Nor is tennis the only athletic field where nonsense is talked about the ability and performance of the sexes.

Towards the end of the last century certain sports commentators, obviously lacking in any sense of reality, forecast that one day women might run as fast as men, even saying that this would happen in marathon races by 1998 and that early in the 21st century women would run as fast as men in shorter distances.

The public - in America at least - were obviously duped into believing this arrogant nonsense, as a poll of 1,000 adults found that 66 percent of Americans believe "the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels" (Tharp, 1996).

As we all now know, this has not happened. In fact the opposite is the case. Over the last 40 years the worlds fastest female athletes have been getting slower and the men have been getting faster. The most likely reason for this is that drug testing has reduced the use of anabolic steroids so that all athletes have to rely on their natural bodies for their performance.

The huge hormonal gap between men and women can never be closed. Women have a lack of testosterone, the male hormone which gives the "get up and go". Women's bodies have 80% more fat that men's and their muscle mass is much smaller. Women have smaller brains and smaller hearts.

I think the optimistic talk about the forthcoming performances of female athletes has now been well and truly buried. At a time when male marathon runners can sit down and have ten minute chat after the women have started, and still beat them by a comfortable margin, it's time for women tennis players at Wimbledon to be glad of what they receive. It looks as though, at the moment, they are being overpaid.