Golf Club refuses to allow women members

[Glasgowghirl]

Muirfield Golf Club in Scotland has voted against allowing women to be members women are only allowed to play as guests as a result the will no longer be allowed to host Open championships. It shocking in this day and age women are still not treated equally and even worse considering that Scotlands First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is a woman and the other two main party leaders Kezia Dugdale and Ruth Davidson are women. So you can be a woman and run a country but you can't join a golf club

[caszandra]

Royal Troon Golf Club who are hosting the Open this year also do not allow women to be members. In light of Muirfield voting against allowing women to become members and losing the right to host the Open it is looking increasingly likely that Royal Troon members will have to vote if they will allow women to become members and if it doesn't they will also lose the right to host future Open Championships. It is also bad for the local economy for the Open to be taken off Muirfield, local businesses will lose out on a lot of trade that comes from tourists visiting not just during the competition but before and after it.

I talked to my dad about this last night as he is a retired Golf Pro, he is dumbfounded that the club took the risk of losing the Open and says it is now up to the board to call an extraordinary general meeting to go over the decision and possibly look at changing their voting rules as more than half the members did vote to allow women to join.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Glasgowghirl]

Same here I don't get it. It's out dated their are plenty of professional women athletes and they should be welcomed

[dawbs]

They'd rather their sandboxes close than have to share their toys

[Maggie Mae]

It's so weird that they would want to lose that business. 

However, I belong to a women's only gym and I'm often asked why it's okay to have women's only spaces and not men only spaces. I don't know the answer, and I do think it's weird. However, I think the economic benefit to a men's only gym isn't as strong as a women's only or co-ed. 

My bf is actually super annoyed about my instance on going to the women's only branch of our gym. I like it because it's cleaner and it's the only one with TLC. If they hadn't stopped having TLC at the branch by my house, I might not go to the Women's club as often. /shallow

[EmainMacha]

At the golf club I went to as a girl women could only be associate members. My dad tabled a motion for women to be admitted as full members but it wasn't passed. Afterwards a few of the more prominent women associates had a go at him for bringing it up as they didn't want to pay full fees. For my teenage feminist self it was a very depressing experience on all fronts.

[Glasgowghirl]

its one thing women or men only gyms as you may not someone of the opposite sex see you work out but to exclude women and they used the excuse they might not understand our rules and disrupt our lunch arrangements is disgraceful. I know all the Scottish Football Clubs now have women teams, all sport should have room for both sexes.

[FundieFarmer]

For golf clubs, this really isn't uncommon honestly. It's not fair, but it's not uncommon. I'd say that country clubs are one of the places that misogyny and racism are still widely accepted- especially in the Deep South, but it's true worldwide (I grew up playing competitive golf). I don't see it changing anytime soon.

[unsafetydancer]

Golf has a few vaguely sexist traditions. When I worked on my local golf course one summer only the teenage boys were allowed to do some jobs like caddying and the girls were relegated to waitressing and litter picking.

I think it's daft that they won't change their rules so that the Open can be played there. Then again I also grew up in a golf town. The golf doesn't bring nearly as much money into the town as the people on the local council and in the golf clubs say it does. A lot of the big golfing hotels are now owned by big international companies and the people taking part in the golf are unlikely to buy food and drink in little local stores when they have stuff provieded for them. While I guess it's a pretty cool thing if you're into golf I just used to ignore it when it came to my town unless I could score a summer job there.

[47of74]

I've come across a couple women only workout spaces.  One of the hotels I stayed at when I went to Turkey had a women only workout room.  I also saw down at a Y branch in the Quad Cities they had a space set aside for women as well - the branch in question used to be a Gold's Gym so I guess they kept that feature when they bought the property.  

I was reading about the Burning Tree Club in Bethesda, Maryland, which also has a no women folk policy.  They used to extend honorary memberships to the justices of the Supreme Court until Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed to the court.  There used to be a number of highly ranked politicians - including Presidents and Congressmen - who played there.  Nowadays though fewer politicians play there as they don't want to support discrimination by being members.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Tree_Club

 

[libriatrix]

On May 20, 2016 at 4:12 PM, Maggie Mae said:

It's so weird that they would want to lose that business. 

However, I belong to a women's only gym and I'm often asked why it's okay to have women's only spaces and not men only spaces. I don't know the answer, and I do think it's weird. However, I think the economic benefit to a men's only gym isn't as strong as a women's only or co-ed. 

super interesting question. After thinking about it for a while, I think:

1. It's more ok because it's an attempt to even up opportunities that have been unfairly uneven for a very long time. In other words, women are sitting at a disadvantage so to put them on an even level of opportunities we need to create a more opportunities for them, disproportionate to the amount of opportunities we need to create for men.

2. It's not completely ok. Because of #1 there's a danger of favoring women over men. However this is way less important a concern than #1 simply because it's only created by people following #1 and doesn't occur naturally in society. It's just a concern that feminists need to keep in the back of their minds in a don't-go-overboards way, not a concern that it's ok to use to redirect the conversation completely away from #1

 

It also seems important to make the distinction between men-only spaces that are the default, and men-only spaces that are just an option along with women-only spaces. I know extremely little about golf but it's my impression that the only option are men-only clubs or co-ed ones, and that the men-only clubs tend to be the only ones in the town they're in, right? It's not like there's a women-only club just down the street. Rather, we're dealing with an attitude of "Only men play golf and any women dabbling in it will just annoy the men so they're not allowed." 

 

 

[caszandra]

Royal Troon Golf Club will hold a special meeting on the 1st of July to propose the introduction of Women members. After a recent consultation it was found that over three-quarters of it's members were in favour of admitting Women as members. Hopefully this will go through and Troon can reflect modern society with equality for all.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/golf/36431209

[caszandra]

Royal Troon have voted overwhelmingly to admit women members and Muirfield is seeking to have a fresh ballot on women members.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/golf/article-3670827/Members-Open-Championship-venue-Royal-Troon-vote-overwhelmingly-favour-admitting-women-club.html