Mean girls and showbiz on Tour

Manhattan: Venus Williams, 6ft 1in in stocking feet, incalculable in heels, stands up to address the small private dining room.

It's a chilly spring day in Manhattan, and Williams is one of three world champions in the room, making everyone else shorter, weedier, untroubled by world ranking and feel like inferior branches of evolution.

We are here to talk about what Stacey Allaster, head of the Women's Tennis Association (WTA), calls the drive for "strong women, on the court and off" most pressingly in terms of parity of earnings with the men, but also solidarity, sexist coverage of the women's game and, as Ana Ivanovic, the 22-year-old Serb who won the French Open in 2008, tells me, the biggest problem on the women's tour: unfriendliness.

"Who's the prettiest?" she says, buttering a roll, her slim wrist holding up a Rolex the size of a child's fist. "Who's the most popular, the most fashionable, who's getting the most coverage?"

She smiles sorrowfully to acknowledge that, when it comes to these contests, she tends to do quite well. "In the men's game, they're all friends. But we're not friends. You can be on the tour for 10 years and still not be friends. It's sad."

Ironies

Everyone is being friendly today — Kim Clijsters in a spangly wool top at the end of the table and Williams, smiling at guests with the noblesse of a queen. Those present aren't sports journalists, but the ladies of the New York fashion press, convened by the WTA to meet the top players and consider them for coverage.

Any ironies in the room are smoothed away by how good we all feel about the strong-woman narrative.

Williams, naturally, is the one to make a speech. In a quiet voice, she recounts her negotiations for equal prize money at Wimbledon ("I was ready for the rejection stamp, and then they gave way") and at the French Open ("I had the placards ready, and they gave way, too") and outlines her general philosophy which, Allaster says, anoints her as the heir to Billie Jean King, moral leader of the women's game: "We all have the same heart beating inside us," she says. "We should be equal."

Afterwards, I ask Williams about an incident that got far more coverage recently than anything she has talked about.

At the Australian Open, she lunged for a ball and briefly exposed her skin-tone pants. Did it annoy her when the photo went round the world? "No." She laughs. "I designed that skirt with the slits so it would do that."

In awe of Williams

When lesser players talk in awe about the Williams sisters, it's not just the tennis they mean but this, the leisurewear range, and how it profits from coverage officially frowned on.

It's either brilliant exploitation of a sexist media or a complete sellout, but in any case is considered, by most players, to be the site of real empowerment in the women's game. "Next time," Williams says, "I'm going to put some lace in there, and maybe some light whalebone."

But Venus, people thought you weren't wearing any knickers. She looks puzzled. "Yeah, weird, right? I mean, who would do that?"

Spend any time backstage at a major tennis tournament and you will see the first-class players glide around like royalty while everyone else fights for space.

At the Crandon Park tennis centre in Florida, crowds gather for the first week of the Sony Ericsson Open, one of the glitziest tournaments outside the grand slams.

It is on Key Biscayne, a palm-fringed spit off the coast of Miami, co-sponsored this year by Bombay Sapphire and with $700,000 in prize money for the women's champion.

Outside, it is 90F. In the warren of changing rooms beneath the stadium, it is cool and dank, there is no phone reception and flocks of tennis players fly by like the corps de ballet, wet-haired from the shower and en route to five minutes of interviews with journalists from their home countries.

Over the course of three days, I will hear a former Czech champion complain of lack of respect from younger players, Australia's No1 disapprove of Venus's pants stunt, almost everyone bemoan the "Kournikova effect" on coverage of the women's game and the English No 1, Elena Baltacha, suspect someone of stealing her lunch voucher. Above ground, the tournament progresses and the car park fills up with Porsches.

Nature of coverage

Still, there remain a few anomalies to address: the nature of the coverage, the earning opportunities within the women's game and the argument that won't quite die, that male players should be paid more because a) their matches get more viewers and b) they play five sets.

Can we settle this once and for all? The women's final at Wimbledon is routinely watched on TV by more people than the men's. And what has the length of matches got to do with it?

As Baltacha says, "You go to the cinema and you watch a film for three hours and it's crap. Or you watch a film for an hour and a half and it's unbelievable.

"You can't say that in a five-setter the men are doing a better job. We do the same job, so we should get the same money."

It's the TV commentary, however, where the discrepancies are most obvious.

At Wimbledon last year, after years of incremental slippage, focus from the commentary box on women players' clothes, style and grunting was so blatant, so incessant, that almost everyone I spoke to at the time noticed it.

There was a fuss over court placement pretty lower seeds being bumped to the show courts over plainer high ones and while it was part of the general razzification of the tournament, it seemed to fall most heavily on women players.

When veterans get misty-eyed about the good old days, they tend to mean Steffi Graf, who drew crowds by virtue of skill and not showbiz, and made no concessions to the changing nature of the game.

For viewers, nostalgia goes back further, perhaps to the Wimbledon of selective memory, a place of bald grass, endless summer and the prewar vowels of Dan Maskell who, the joke in the commentary box goes, might say two words over the course of a match: "Well played."

Has the domination of the Williams sisters made the game one-dimensional? Who do you think will win the women's singles this year?