MY PORTFOLIO - Men/Women at The MASTERS

My Portfolio

is a collection of articles that motivate me to become that extraordinary individual in the boardroom in business, ministry, classroom, or in the community serving.

Sonya Young

 
Male-Only Golf Enclaves: It's Not Just Augusta

By tradition, the slipping the green jacket onto Bubba Watson at the Masters yesterday marked not only the end of the tournament, but also the end — for a year — of serious discussion of the inescapable discrimination at male-only Augusta National. This year, the rumbling of discontent has focused on Virginia Rometty, the new IBM CEO. Traditionally, the CEO of IBM has been a member of Augusta. But that tradition is nothing compared to the tradition of keeping women out of the club. Rometty did not break the gender barrier this year.

If history is any guide, we’ll have to wait another year before the topic is brought up again in earnest. This is unfortunate, not simply because the Augusta policy is increasingly indefensible, but because what happens at Augusta is not an isolated case. Exclusionary policies are not atypical in the golf world, not just at Augusta or Burning Tree in suburban Washington (the power-broker haven where women continue to be rebuffed), but at smaller outposts throughout the country.

Twice in the last three years, I’ve been approached about joining clubs that have had male-only facilities: areas where men may congregate and women may not enter, even if other areas of the club are integrated. The defenses of these no-ladies-allowed areas has varied, from the legalistic (“it’s a private club, they can do they wish”) to the historical (“it’s tradition here”) to the separate-but-equal (“sometimes, we have women’s-only events”) to the dismissive (“there’s nothing special in there”).

But when I toured the facilities, I had my two daughters with me. And I knew that we if joined, they would regularly walk down a hallway past a door they would never be allowed to open. It would be tempting to call the closed door into the men’s-only lounge a metaphor for the difficulty my daughters may face breaking into an old-boy’s network, except it isn’t a metaphor. The door is real. And the reason they can’t walk in is based purely on their sex.

We declined.

But there is a metaphor in the closed door at the local clubs and in the more famous keep-out signs at famous clubs: where it’s legally permissible, some men are going to try to keep women out, on or away from the links. That has an impact far beyond Augusta — indeed, an impact that reaches into the workplace — and explains why my eldest daughter, after listening to an extended discussion of Augusta’s policies, said she’d consider running away if I ever had the temerity to join such a club. It’s not that she’s horrified at the idea of me playing golf with a bunch of other guys. It’s that she’s already aware that the playing field can be tilted away from women in a thousand subtle ways, and Augusta’s celebration of exclusion is nothing close to subtle.

Pressure on Augusta National has traditionally peaked going into the Masters and all but disappeared thereafter. But it would be nice if the issue were kept alive, not simply in continued public questions about Augusta National, but around those courses that — while they may not be household names — continue to enable a culture where women can be excluded without scrutiny. But this is not about golf. The game, in pop culture, is frequently seen as analogous to business. Refusing to take a hard look at these policies at the country club only makes it more difficult to take them on in the office.

Virginia Rometty

"Ginni" Rometty may lead this 100-year-old tech company into the future. The 30-year Big Blue veteran was promoted in 2010 to head its global sales, marketing and strategy, giving her responsibility for results in 170 markets around the world and annual revenue that climbed to nearly $100 billion. This year speculation mounted over who would be tapped to succeed current CEO Sam Palmisano, 60, and Rometty's name floated to the top of the candidate pool. Her track record should help. She previously led a massive integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, creating a team of 100,000 consultants, and led the transformations of global delivery centers in China and India. If chosen, Rometty would be the first female chief of IBM, one of the five largest U.S. companies by market cap.