While not using the word “retirement”, Serena Williams did announce this week that she will be “evolving” away from playing tennis.
And it’s clear she really, really doesn’t want to go.
But she’s feeling the pull of something else. That is, a desire to expand her family. Williams has balanced work and elite playing extremely successfully so far, continuing to achieve incredible highs beyond the age tennis players typically peak, and even winning the Australian Open while two months’ pregnant. She could continue to go further and potentially break Margaret Court’s record of 24 Grand Slam wins (Williams currently has 23). But doing so requires making a choice that, as Williams describes, wouldn’t be asked of her male playing colleagues with a wife at home.
“I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family.
“But I’m turning 41 this month, and something’s got to give.”
The piece Williams penned for the September 2022 cover story of Vogue magazine is heartbreaking to read. Williams is open about how difficult she finds the topic of giving up tennis actually is, saying she cries at the thought of it and has had difficulty broaching the matter with her own family.
It’s heartbreaking because we all know how many women have had to make that very same decision to move away from the career, project, purpose or passion they really, really love in order to expand a family or spend more time with the family they have.
And we know such decisions and sacrifices are not shared equally between men and women.
We’ve seen research highlighting how women more typically adjust their careers for family life.
We know in Australia, how the gender pay gap expands between mothers and fathers. Figures published just this year highlighted how the cost of being a mother is significantly higher than being a father in Australia. In many cases, the career or not decision within heterosexual couples with children is determined along financial lines alone.
We’ve seen our own high-profile examples of women leaving careers, citing the desire to expand or spend more time with a young family. I was reminded this week of former Minister for Women Kelly O’Dwyer’s surprise announcement that she would be leaving politics just prior to the 2019 election due to “deeply personal reasons” which included a desire to have a third child and spend more time with her young family.
Like Williams, O’Dwyer also started her family while at the heights of her career: becoming the first woman to give birth while serving as a Cabinet Minister. Like Williams, O’Dwyer proved that “women can have a family and serve at the highest levels,” as she said in her final parliamentary speech. And like Williams, O’Dwyer demonstrated that for some women – many women – something does indeed have to give. Just prior to O’Dwyer’s final speech, Labor member Kate Ellis delivered her own final speech, having joined Parliament at the age of 26 and having two children during her time in politics, in 2015 and 2017. She told her family she was “leaving a job that I love for me. I am leaving because you have given me something more than I love this.”
Williams shared an emotional goodbye in Toronto, shedding a tear after losing 6-2, 6-4 to Belinda Bencic the day after she announced that this year’s US open would be her last. If Williams were to win the US Open later this month, she would equal Margaret Court’s record of 24 Grand Slam titles.
She said “it is what it is” having been open in the Vogue piece that “there is no happiness in this topic for me” and that she hates having to be at this “crossroads”.
“I wish it could be easy for me, but it’s not. I’m torn.
“I don’t want it to be over, but at the same time I’m ready for what’s next.”