How Wimbledon became the surprising face of progress for women’s sport

With a decision to allow ‘period safe’ tennis kit, the All England Club is helping to move an important conversation out of the locker-room and into the public domain, writes Gemma Abbott

Watson has described it as a ‘forward-thinking’ move (Getty Images for LTA)

British tennis player Heather Watson is one of the first players to have openly welcomed this year’s rule change at Wimbledon, which sees female participants in the tournament no longer being required to wear white undergarments. Watson has described it as a “forward-thinking” move by the All England Club.

I’m not sure it’s “forward-thinking” as much as tennis “catching up” with a period-awareness movement that’s been happening for some time now across all of women’s sport.

But that’s not to say it’s any less welcome or worthy of praise. After all, we’re talking about a sport which has long struggled to overcome its propagation of gender imbalance. It took more than three decades after the founding of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) for all four Grand Slam tournaments to even agree to give male and female players the same prize money.