Alternative Prize Money Distributions for Higher Gender Equity in Sports

In many sports, women receive less prize money than men. This issue has been discussed extensively over decades. While many people consider different prize structures for men and women as unfair, others argue, e.g., that men attract greater public interest or that the competition is harder among men than among women (in particular, when there participate more men than women). In this paper, we focus on the discussion of fairness in the distribution of prize money in endurance sports concerning the severity of the competition. We present two methods to distribute prize money across gender based on the individual performances w.r.t. gender specific records. We suppose these “across gender distributions” to be fair, as they suitably respect that women generally are slower than men. Furthermore, we compare commonly used prize distributions to our across gender distributions, introducing a statistical fairness measure. For our investigations, we focus on triathlon, but the results can easily be adapted to any other endurance sports.