World's best ever women's tennis player forced to give up work to have children

[ZeldaFighter]

I'm a bit late to the party on this but I've been waiting for someone - anyone - to say it. How come the world's best ever women's tennis player is having to give up so she can have a baby? Why is no one outraged at the lack of work/life balance?

Children have wrecked my career (couldn't take a new job as pregnant and wouldn't have qualified for maternity pay) so this is a bigger issue than just Serena!

I’m confused. Serena Williams is not leaving tennis to have a baby, is she?

From what I understand, yes. More than happy to be proved wrong though.

"Further supporting and possibly expanding her family were some of the main reasons behind her decision to leave the game of tennis."

She is 40 and had a really difficult birth with her first child so I read this as giving up to have another baby.

Surely she's choosing to give up and have a baby?

At the age of 40 how long do you expect her to be playing top -range tennis? And I doubt she has been forced to give up.

You aren't wrong in general but the career of professional tennis players is not the same length as other industries. Late 20s is not unusual, a really good player training hard and well motivated might well make it to their mid 30s. So in translation to 'regular' work and retirement it's like a 68 year old retiring to spend more time with their family; hence little to no outrage.

But yeah for many of us it's pregnant then screwed...

Surely she could have chosen to stop playing earlier in life (and still have more wealth than the vast majority of women on the planet) and tried to started a family then?

I’m struggling to feel any outrage or sympathy tbh.

Compared to federer who has four children ( 2 sets of twins) and that has not impacted his ability to keep playing at a top level you do have a point.
Even one child for a female sportswoman has an impact in the way it just doesn’t for a male athlete.
not sure what can be done about it exactly as biology is biology but it is a marked difference between the sexes and should be acknowledged.

It's not a normal career though is it? Elite sporting professionals have to be realistic about their career length, babies or no.

40 is about the time you'd expect Serena to wind her career down. She won't be happy about it because she is a driven, competitive person but in a few years, she'd have naturally lost a lot more form. Good decision to have more kids now, and she may well come back doing doubles or something else.

Serena Williams has chosen to make a career in sport. There are innumerable other careers where a woman taking a short period out to have a baby would make little difference in the long run, and getting older isn't necessarily an issue. Unfortunately, elite sport isn't one of them. She's 40 years old. Her career would have been drawing to a natural close soon anyway. Federer has just retired at 41, after all.

Yes this. If she was giving up at the height of her career to start a family I'd agree with you OP. But she hasn't won a Grand Slam title since 2017, hasn't reached a Grand slam final since 2019, hasn't played a huge amount since then and has been ranked outside the top 200 for all of 2022. I think she is amazing and the best female players ever, and one of the best sportswomen ever, but to say she is having to quit just to have a baby is plain wrong.

She’s 40!! She’s played far longer than most athletes. Ferderer is 41 and similarly just retired.

She isn’t giving up for kids she’s giving up
because she is past her best and will only get beaten more and more and end up physically broken.

Obviously she has to take a year out to have her first kid, and a male player would not, but nothing you can do about that. Her husband is a tech billionaire and took 4 months paternity to look after their first baby, so she arranged it as well as she could.

I think it’s about time people understand that as women carry the children there will always be more implications for them. It’s biology.

Federer can not be compare because he did not carry his children.

Serena already has a child and did not retire to have that child. Trying to remain at the top level of a sport at 40 is difficult enough for both men and women. To do it pregnant is even more difficult.

She doesn’t have to give up the sport. She is choosing to.

Given her wealth, it’s a genuine choice. It’s not the same as someone on a minimum wage job having to give up work because they cant afford childcare.

Serena is not the poster girl for ‘look how difficult women have it in the work place’

Having children didn’t wreck your career either. You can’t start a new job then too up and say ‘oh I am going off in a few months for anything up to a year, can I have all the benefits I would have if I had been here longer’ for any reasons. Be it pregnancy, caring for elderly parents or just taking a year off.

You could have made a move after. That move could have been a disaster.

Having babies can impact womens careers. But These are both bad examples.

She’s 40, off the pace, past her best and looking to other things in her life, just like many other top athletes. It’s nothing to do with her sex or decisions around having a baby. This current era of tennis players like Williams, Federer, Nadal and even Djokovic is unusual, playing until late 30s onwards. Nearly every sport in existence has elite athletes retiring by that age.

Very few to flight sports professionals in their 40s.

Serena could easily have afforded to pay for ‘social surrogacy’, sadly not an unusual practice amongst super wealthy/celebrity Americans in Serena’s circle.

That she didn’t do that and instead talked about the difficulties of juggling competition, training and motherhood makes her an even more admirable sports professional, to my mind.

Humans are mammals. We do need to accept that sexual dimorphism exists.

that takes nothing away from Serena’s remarkable career, only adds to it, imo.

This is a Vogue puff piece from when Serena was on maternity leave (probably not the correct phrase in that particular career) but it’s a fun read and Serena’s feelings about pregnancy and the post partum period are very relatable (even if the thought of a personal chef isn’t!)

www.vogue.com/article/serena-williams-vogue-cover-interview-february-2018/

Serena Williams deserves her place in tennis history and if she now chooses to direct her time and energy towards her family? Fair play to her!

Surely one can have sympathy for the fact that being a professional sportswoman is very difficult to combine with prenancy, especially compared to how easy it is for a male sportsman's body to cope with his partner being pregnant.

Surely you can see that it is a real shame that she had to weigh up money, success, legcay in the game, with her biological clock?

I'm not saying much else, just surely you can have a bit of sympathy, even if, obviously, "extremely rich woman can't have the impossible" is hardly the greatest sob story in history.

Most women tennis players are past the top level at 30, Serena was special, along with a few others, it’s exactly the same with other careers having a family WILL change your life.
When I had my children there was no wall to wall childcare, I worked mostly night shift, husband worked daytimes, yes, it was bloody hard. It’s your choice to have children accept you are a woman and have to make that choice, don’t complain about something you can’t change.

I mean she's 40 and way past her best, this is nothing to do with having children. Most players male or female retire in their 30s.

She already has a child. She didn’t give up for the first. She isn’t giving up just for the second. She is giving up for lots of reasons.

If I was a millionaire and quitting my job, that I have done for far longer than most women, so I could prioritise my family and adding to my family and people felt sorry for me, I would be baffled.

Sorry but this is genuinely fucking stupid. She's an elite athlete. That means being in prime physical fitness. Pregnancy takes a physical toll on your body. You can't be an elite athlete while pregnant. It's just not biologically possible. You probably can't be an elite athlete in the immediate post-partum period either because first of all, your body needs to recover from pregnancy and after that it needs time to get back into peak-fitness. That will take a toll on the career of an elite athlete. And that's without breastfeeding. If the woman chooses to breastfeed, that will also need to be factored into what may not be realistic as an athlete.

There is also the reality that being an elite athlete, isn't always the best thing for your body. So it's more than possible that the exercise schedule and diet that make for maximum sporting performance, will make it difficult to get and stay pregnant.

That's biological reality. In life people have to make choices. Any woman who wants biological children and chooses to pursue a career based around physical fitness, be that as the top seeded tennis player, a professional dancer or a speleologist, will have to choose between those two things at some point in a way that man will not. Pretending that this is some sort of deliberate unfairness is ridiculous.

I think it’s about time people understand that as women carry the children there will always be more implications for them. It’s biology.
Exactly, thank you. This by the way, is why we need to protect women's sport.
Oh and Serena is fabulous.

You've put a really weird spin on her choice. I think she is just retiring as many athletes do, usually at a younger age too.

Regardless of whether she’s had a baby, going to have more babies, or anything to do with babies, the real biological reality is that it’s practically unheard of to be an elite tennis player in your 40s. That’s the reality. The best female player in the world right now, Iga Świątek, wasn’t even born when Williams won her first grand slam, the 1999 US Open.

I think Williams desperately wanted one more GS to overtake Margaret Court’s record, but has realised it isn’t going to happen. She’s dropped the baby reason in there which I think was unnecessary, just say “it’s time”.

She's 40. She would be retiring soon anyway. Why does everything have to be a sob fest and poor little women need to be pitied for everything they do?

Didn't mean to quote you, hearthnhome sorry

But the point for me is that Federer has been a parent and playing at top level tennis for 13 years and was able to have four children too and retired at 41.
He did not need to delay fatherhood and has been able to have lots of children.
The same wouldn’t have been the case for Serena. If she had had twins 13 years ago at 27 she’d never have made it to retire at 40. It was delaying motherhood that allowed her to last as long as she did in the sport at the highest levels.
Presumabky she delayed motherhood as she knew the impact it would have in her career.
Federer did not need to consider this and could therefore have twins at 27.
That’s just a fact and is the difference between the two and is because of the difference between male and female biology