The era of parity in Women’s tennis

In recent years, the WTA Tour has developed a reputation for offering a more competitive brand of tennis than the men’s game. That is perhaps unsurprising. Over the last two decades the men’s tour has seen the triarchy of Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer dominate and then give way to the current duopoly of Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz (all before Djokovic has even retired). Serena Williams was alone atop the mountaintop for awhile, but otherwise the WTA Tour has not seen a similar dynasty emerge.

On the contrary, in recent times it seems like the parity on the WTA Tour has gone up to a level where you never know which player might win any given match. That has been particularly apparent at this year’s WTA Finals where the group stage unfolded in an unpredictable manner. Equally, even before the event, there were statistical trends that pointed to this year’s WTA Finals being unpredictable.

The players competing at this year’s WTA Finals were: Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff, Amanda Anisimova, Jessica Pegula, Elena Rybakina, Madison Keys and Jasmine Paolini. They are listed in order of seeding, but two of the top four – Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff – bowed out of the season-ending championships in the round-robin stage.

Why did it happen? Well for starters, the head-to-head records between the players indicated that this was going to be a particularly unpredictable tournament.

The top seed Aryna Sabalenka had a 40-32 overall record against the rest of the field, which is not a very impressive win rate – except that these are the very best players in the world and tennis is ultimately a sport of 50-50s. Every point, every set, and every match can only go one of two ways.

Sabalenka has demonstrated that she is slightly more likely to beat a top eight opponent than she is to lose to them. Interestingly, that is also true of most of the rest of the field, with Jasmine Paolini the only player at a notable disadvantage compared to the rest of the field with an 11-25 record overall.

The best player statistically was Iga Swiatek with a 43-22 record overall, but even she didn’t really bring any consistency to this event and if we have learned anything from this event it is that anybody can beat anybody on a given day. Take Swiatek’s match against Elena Rybakina for example, where she won the opening set 6-3 but then lost the next two 1-6 0-6.

That’s not the norm for such a matchup, which generally tends to be close. Admittedly, this one did go the distance but swung wildly between extremes. Swiatek found herself of the wrong end of a similar result against Anisimova where she also won the opening set but then lost the next two.

Out of the 18 total matches played in the group stage, only six ended in straight sets and half of those were Paolini matches. Given that the Italian barely qualified and has been struggling with her tennis for a while, that is not particularly instructive.

So the eye test is not deceiving anybody. We are truly in the era of parity when it comes to women’s tennis because right now anybody can beat anybody and everybody is beating everybody. Perhaps very few players are playing at a high enough level compared to the opposition to consistently win without any issues. Perhaps every player is playing at a high enough level that no one can seize command.

What is clear is that the stage is set for an entertaining 2026.