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Italian translation at settesei.it

The officiating in Saturday night’s US Open women’s final has become a hot-button issue, to put it mildly. Many of the complaints about Serena Williams’s treatment at the hands of chair umpire Carlos Ramos come down to a belief that Ramos’s actions were sexist. Most of us have seen players–both men and women–act in ways that seem more objectionable than anything Serena did, and anybody paying attention has seen innumerable coaching violations go unpenalized.

There are a few things we can all agree on. First: Not all umpires are the same. Ramos is more strict than, say, Mohamed Lahyani. Second: Officials have a lot of latitude, so something that triggers a penalty in one match may not have the same result in another match. And third: Umpires usually do everything they can not to call game penalties. A lot of matches have at least one warning, whether for coaching, ball abuse, or a variety of other things, but only a small percentage of them escalate to the loss of a point or game. Of course, players typically proceed with caution as well. Once a warning has been called, you don’t see nearly as many rackets smashed or balls sent sailing out of the stadium.

The differences between umpires, and the latitude granted to them within the rules, makes it easy to point to any given call and accuse the umpire of sexism, racism, favoritism, homerism, Fed-hating, Rafa-hating, or good old-fashioned stupidity. The rarity of point and game penalties makes Saturday night’s decisions all the more glaring, since within each umpire’s range of options, they rarely go nuclear and dock an entire game.

Some numbers

Point penalties–let alone game penalties–are so rare that it’s impossible to draw concrete conclusions. Still, let’s take a look at what we have. As far as I know, none of the ATP, WTA, ITF, or USTA have released any data on penalties, the players who receive them, or the umpires who levy them. (This would be a great time to do so, but I’m not holding my breath.) As an alternative, we can turn to the increasingly sizable dataset of the Match Charting Project (MCP), which now spans over 3,500 matches from the 2010s alone.

MCP data is not random, since matches are chosen by charters in part because of their personal interests. But in a way, that’s good for today’s purposes: MCP matches skew in the direction of notability, with a disproportionate number of finals and substantial data for top players, including over 100 matches for Serena. With those caveats in mind, let’s take a look at penalties in matches from 2010 to the present, not including Saturday’s final. The final column, “P%”, is the percent of matches in which a penalty was levied.

Category Matches Penalties P% Women (all) 1895 13 0.69% Women (slams) 490 6 1.22% Women (finals) 228 2 0.88% Men (all) 1689 16 0.95% Men (slams) 234 6 2.56% Men (finals) 371 5 1.35%

Men receive more point penalties than women in three separate comparisons: All MCP matches, matches at grand slams*, and finals. The grand slam numbers are particularly pertinent because it is the only category in which the umpires are drawn from the same pool. At other events, the ATP and WTA use separate groups of officials.

(I’m ignoring full-game penalties because there’s almost no data. In these 3,500-plus matches, there was only one instance where things escalated beyond the point penalty stage: Grigor Dimitrov’s meltdown at the 2016 Istanbul final.)

* Update: A number of people have pointed out that the grand slam comparison isn’t exactly apples-to-apples, because men play best-of-five. True. I’m not sure, however, if we should expect proportionally more penalties in longer matches. Coaching, for instance, would continue throughout a match until identified as a code violation, and then (one would hope) stop. That said, it is certainly true that on a per-point or per-set basis, the gender gap at majors is smaller than these numbers suggest, though it still leaves us with more point penalties against men.

These numbers aren’t proof of gender fairness, nor do they establish sexism against either women or men. Aside from the limited number of penalties, we know nothing about the actions that led to them, or about similar instances that didn’t trigger penalties. Perhaps men are generally more abusive to officials, so they should receive half again as many–or even more–penalties than women. I don’t know, and it’s likely that nobody else commenting on the Serena-Ramos incident knows either. Anecdotes are a key ingredient in this sort of vitriol. To firmly settle the issue, we’d need to set up a controlled study, perhaps by instructing a set of male and female players to berate umpires in identical ways and then comparing the results. As entertaining as that would be, it’s not going to happen.

None of this is to say that accusations of sexism require statistical support to be valid. They don’t. But in cases where the data is available, especially when it is possessed by some of the very organizations making accusations, it’s a shame that the numbers get ignored. The limited information available to us via the MCP indicates that men are more frequently penalized by chair umpires than women are. The USTA, ITF, and WTA could go a long way to clear up the issue–whether officials are consistently equitable or there is a pattern of harsher treatment of female players–by releasing details of all matches, including the number and causes of warnings and penalties, as well as the identity of the umpires. Alas, the more likely outcome is a few more weeks of unsubstantiated grandstanding.