Is the wall that has always existed between the men’s and women’s games starting to crack?

The countdown to the 2023 season is underway. As we close in on the start of the new, dual-gender United Cup (December 29), TENNIS.com's writers will debate the 10 biggest questions heading into the new tennis year.

Is the wall that has always existed between the men’s and women’s games starting to crack?

Peter Bodo: There is only one significant obstacle to a merger between the WTA and the ATP, and that’s money. The ATP Tour generates more revenue and its leaders don’t want that siphoned off to support the weaker—financially speaking—WTA Tour. Otherwise, the wall separating the tours is crumbling. Combined non-Grand Slam events are increasingly popular. There is growing interest in mixed-gender team events. The rankings and tournament structure mirror each other.

Figuratively, there are some interesting confluences between the WTA and ATP. The men are embracing and redefining the all-court game—once the domain of the women—like never before, and the WTA game is increasingly focused on the twin hallmarks of the ATP game: power and effective serving. While some key differences between the tours remain, tennis no longer looks like two different games depending on gender.

Steve Tignor: It certainly will look that way at the start of the year. The United Cup, which begins December 29, is the first dual-gender competition to offer ranking points for players from both tours. For those of us who stubbornly subscribe to the “stronger together” mantra, this is an improvement on the event it replaces, the all-male ATP Cup. For the first time, we’ll see stars like Rafael Nadal and Iga Swiatek on the same court, with real stakes involved.

At the same time, Netflix’s docuseries about the 2022 season, which features players from both tours, is scheduled to debut early in 2023. If the United Cup is a crowd-pleasing event, and Netflix shows us women fighting it out in a major sport just like the men, that could open some skeptics’ eyes to the possibilities of marketing the tours as a single product.

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Stephanie Livaudais: After suffering financially due to COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, and during a season when both of their biggest global stars walked away from the game, the ATP and WTA Tours have chosen to align their priorities a little more closely.

The wall separating the men’s and women’s game is indeed starting to crack, and seeing combined events like the United Cup and the returning Hopman Cup being added to the tennis calendar is a positive sign of the direction this partnership is trying to go. Crossover marketing efforts—including the upcoming Netflix series following various ATP and WTA players—reinforce this closeness.

But the wall will never come down until the biggest separation is finally addressed: Men and women players still earn radically different prize money figures, and the issue is more pronounced for those outside the Top 20.

Matt Fitzgerald: The ATP and WTA working in tandem has increased—at least on the surface—since the tours reopened in August 2020, and the Netflix series will help further package the sport as one product to new audiences. The upcoming United Cup, which supplanted a men’s only team event Down Under, advances the strength of competition being together.

But which wall are we talking about?

This year, WTA No. 1 Iga Swiatek won three different WTA 500 events: they paid out $380,000, $93,823 and $116,340. ATP No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz won two different ATP 500s: they paid out $317,400 and €467,150 (approx. $495,511). The 2022 ATP Finals put forth a purse of $14.75 million; the 2019 WTA Finals approached that figure in its Shenzhen debut at $14 million, but the women's year-end event has dropped significantly to $5 million the past two years (one impact of not staging the tournament in China).

If it's becoming one tour for all, that wall has hardly reached the point of collapsing in 2023.