Women’s tennis players will receive paid maternity leave for the first time in WTA Tour history, through a new program funded by the Public Investment Fund (PIF) — the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia.
The WTA announced on Thursday that paid leave of up to 12 months will be complemented by access to grants for fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilization (IVF) and egg freezing. The tour estimates that more than 320 players will be eligible for the program. Each player that takes up funding will be paid the same, as-yet-undisclosed sum proportional to the duration of their leave.
Two-time Grand Slam champion Victoria Azarenka is a member of the WTA Players’ Council. In an interview on Tuesday from the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif., she said, “When I was pregnant, it was talked about as part of the rules around injuries. And I thought it was not very appropriate to call that an injury.
“When you aren’t able to perform, you lose your income and financial stability. So it was very important to see what we could do and how we could help.”
The initiative is one of the most significant developments in the multi-year partnership between the WTA and PIF signed last May, as well as Saudi Arabia’s increased visibility in women’s tennis. Last April, the WTA Tour and Saudi Tennis Federation signed a three-year deal to move the season-ending WTA Tour Finals to the kingdom, whose ‘Personal Status Law’ requires women to obtain a male guardian’s permission to marry and which was ranked ranked 126th out of 146 nations included in the 2024 Global Gender Gap index.
“The pioneering initiative, supported by PIF and championed by the WTA Players’ Council, marks the first time in women’s sports history that comprehensive maternity benefits are available to independent, self-employed athletes,” the WTA said in a statement.
When asked on Monday about the possible disconnect between a breakthrough in employment benefits for women being so closely tied to a nation whose human rights record toward women and LGBTQI+ people has been heavily criticized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, WTA chief executive Portia Archer said in a video interview: “Questions about Saudi society are really not questions for me or the WTA. They’re questions for the Saudis to answer.”
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Maternity provisions across women’s sports largely hinge on infrastructure, and whether or not players are employees of a team or league or, effectively, independent contractors. In golf, LPGA players can freeze their status on the tour for a couple of years, but there is no paid leave. In 2018, two-time major champion Stacy Lewis secured funding for maternity leave, but from KPMG, one of her sponsors.
In English football’s Women’s Super League (WSL), players receive 100 percent of their weekly wage, plus any other benefits and remuneration, for the first 14 weeks of maternity leave. Players are also entitled to maternity pay regardless of how long they have been employed by their club; until 2022, only players under contract for a minimum of 26 weeks qualified.
In the WNBA, an agreement was signed in 2020 that provided maternity leave for its players with full salary for up to a year, as well as a dedicated space in arenas for nursing mothers and a $5,000 (£4,000) childcare stipend. Players can also apply for reimbursement for up to $60,000 in costs directly related to adoption, surrogacy, egg freezing and fertility treatment. The WNBA and the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) are currently negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), which is likely to go into effect ahead of the 2026 season.
Protections for WTA Tour players who went on voluntary hiatus to have children have previously focused on their position in the world rankings, but they are also a recent initiative. For decades, players’ status as independent contractors — with no team or league funding for maternity pay — meant that their career earnings dictated their financial security away from the court.
Azarenka, who gave birth to her son, Leo, in 2016, and 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams, who returned to the tour in 2018 after having her first child, Olympia, were at the center of changes that allowed players to use the world ranking they had when they went on hiatus to enter tournaments upon their return. When Williams began her comeback, she had to enter tournaments unseeded, despite having been world No. 1 after winning the 2017 Australian Open — the final event she played before going on hiatus.
Since 2019, players have been able to use their former ranking to enter 12 tournaments over three years. They cannot use their former ranking to obtain a seeding, but in the first eight of those 12 tournaments, if their former ranking would have been high enough to be seeded, they cannot be drawn against a seeded player in the first round.
Following fractious meetings at the 2023 WTA Tour Finals in Cancun, Mexico, then-chief executive Steve Simon said maternity pay was “scheduled for review” in a letter to players. That resulted in increased public pressure: Azarenka told the BBC that adding financial support was “the important part” of supporting mothers on the tour, while four-time Naomi Osaka said “having a kid shouldn’t feel like a punishment” in an interview, also with the BBC.
In the interview on Tuesday, Azarenka said those tweaks for the 2019 season helped offer mothers more protection, but didn’t go far enough, before praising the breadth of the new fund. “It’s a conversation that is very global, that goes beyond sport in all types of organisations, and we are the leading women’s sport in the world,” she said.
With more and more tennis players seeing a career break to have a child as something viable in recent years, the WTA has also focused on spotlighting players returning from giving birth. “Mom on a mission” has become a somewhat frequent tagline on its social media, thanks to players such as Belinda Bencic, who returned from giving birth to her first child in October and has since won a WTA 500-level title.
In an interview with The Athletic in January, Bencic explained that she had been inspired to have a baby in her mid-twenties because of what Azarenka, Williams and others had accomplished after returning to the sport. Those two reached major finals after giving birth, and high-profile players Osaka, Angelique Kerber, Caroline Wozniacki and Elina Svitolina have made similar comebacks over the past few years.
Belinda Bencic with her daughter, Bella and the Dubai Tennis Championships trophy. (Fadel Senna / AFP via Getty Images)
In that time, the WTA has also introduced other initiatives focused on postpartum recovery, with some tournaments across the tour’s spectrum offering on-site childcare. A spokesperson told The Athletic in January that regulatory differences in childcare provision across host countries make a universal childcare policy unworkable, but added that the WTA “encourages” tournaments to offer childcare on a case-by-case basis.
“We remain committed to providing resources to help balance parenthood and the demands of competing at the highest level,” the spokesperson said.
In the interview on Monday, Archer said: “We’ve seen players making decisions about maybe ending their careers a little sooner than they would have liked because they want to explore family life or coming back onto the tour and competing maybe sooner than they’re ready. And so we think that this will minimize some of that stress and make those kinds of decisions easier.
“That can be transformational for some players, particularly those earning less than the top players in the world, where these kinds of benefits and support may be more impactful. So we really do hope that it changes lives.”
There are eligibility stipulations for the new maternity fund. Players must either have competed in a minimum of eight WTA tournaments (including Grand Slams) in the 12 months before going on leave, at least four of which must be at WTA 250-level or above; or in a minimum of 24 WTA tournaments (including Grand Slams) over the previous 36 months, at least 12 of which must be at WTA 250-level or above.
Inside Saudi Arabia’s growing influence
This partnership adds to the PIF’s visibility in women’s tennis. It sponsors the ATP and WTA rankings, and Saudi Arabia’s deal to host the WTA Tour Finals came with a $15.25million prize pool for 2024, with increases planned for 2025 and 2026. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is the PIF’s chairman and, in 2023, lawyers representing the fund claimed sovereign immunity in a court case involving LIV Golf in the United States, in which the PIF has invested almost $5bn. The PIF and its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, are respectively “a sovereign instrumentality of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a sitting minister of the government,” a court document said.
In a 2024 report, Human Rights Watch said that the PIF is used to “whitewash the Saudi government’s abuses.”
The PIF did not respond to a request for comment on its relationship with the Saudi state; Saudi Arabian authorities and the PIF declined to comment on any of the allegations in this story when put to them by The Athletic.
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Archer, who described the WTA’s partnership with the PIF as “great,” said that the fund had been “supportive of our ambition to create this comprehensive program of maternity and parental benefits for players.”
“I don’t know what the external perception is but the alignment, the ambition, it’s been great. The PIF has really been pushing us. They want to be novel,” she said.
At the WTA Tour Finals, players were largely reticent to discuss Saudi Arabia’s human rights record; Coco Gauff, who won the event, said she would consider not coming back if she didn’t see meaningful change in the kingdom. In the interview on Monday, Archer repeated the maxim that hosting a marquee event in women’s sports in Saudi Arabia could empower and inspire young women and girls in the country. In an interview in November, Lina Al-Hathloul, the sister of Loujain — a prominent women’s rights advocate in the kingdom who led the campaign for women’s right to drive — told The Athletic that the sporting spectacle of the WTA Tour Finals is indivisible from the political situation. “The same people who allow people to play tennis are also torturing the activists,” she said.
Al-Hathloul and her family allege that Loujain was subjected to torture while imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s judiciary system does not condone, promote, or allow the use of torture,” a Saudi official told CNN in November 2018, in response to a Human Rights Watch report on the alleged abuse of Al-Hathloul, who now lives under a travel ban. “Anyone, whether male or female, being investigated is going through the standard judiciary process led by the public prosecution while being held for questioning, which does not in any way rely on torture either physical, sexual, or psychological.”
Azarenka said she had not been to Saudi Arabia, and described the PIF’s contributions to discussions over maternity pay as “a testament to me that people want to be different.”
She added: “We need partners that see the vision that are supportive financially and also supportive of the changes that we want to make.”
(Top photo of Victoria Azarenka and her son, Leo: Foto Olimpik / NurPhoto via Associated Press)
