LPGA Golfers Don’t Get Paid Because You’re Not Paying Attention

When Stacy Lewis said that she was frustrated by the gender pay gap in professional golf in an interview with GOLF.com this week, her remarks raised a logical follow-up question: Why is this happening?

Why do female professional golfers make pennies on the dollar compared to their male counterparts, and not the usual, if still troubling, $.78 on the dollar that women earn across other professions?

Fair question but it’s also the wrong question.

LPGA players collect smaller checks because there’s greater interest in the men’s game. That leads to bigger sponsorships, fatter TV deals and more revenue for the PGA Tour, and thus ultimately bigger paydays for male pros.

That’s no secret. Lewis specifically brings it up in her interview.

The bigger, better question to ask: Why is there less interest in the women’s game? And better yet, how do we change that?

Female athletes are widely perceived to be inferior: less athletic, less skilled, less entertaining. That perception—the very definition of gender discrimination and inequality—is regularly stated as fact, in the media, on social media and beyond: Women’s athletics are simply less “watchable.”

The critics don’t even go out of their way to veil the gender bias.

But that kind of narrow-minded logic simply doesn’t apply to women’s golf (and shouldn’t be applied to most anything else).

“We’re probably actually hitting more fairways than the guys and more greens than the guys,” Lewis said. “There are certain parts of the game that we actually do better.”

Check the stats. Lewis has hit 97 of 112 fairways this year. That’s a staggering 87% success rate, which doesn’t even place her among the top five players in that category on  the LPGA tour. On the men’s side, Thomas Aiken leads the category. His hit rate: 77.26%.

On the LPGA tour, five players have a greens-in-regulation percentage north of 80%, led by Ha Na Jang, who hits 86% of her greens—eight-six percent! On the PGA Tour this season, not a single player has a GIR rate of better than 80%.

Bombers? The LPGA has those, too, with five players averaging 280-plus off the tee. Lexi Thompson’s average driving distance is an eye-popping 290 yards. That’s just two yards shy of Jordan Spieth’s average poke. Sure, the average driving distance on the LPGA tour is 270 yards, but if the biggest star in men’s golf can turn heads without hitting moon balls, it undercuts “the ladies don’t hit it far enough” argument.

 

Undoubtedly, there are certain spectacles on the PGA Tour with which the women have a hard time competing: Dustin Johnson smoking a drive 340, say, or Bubba Watson bending a ball 90 degrees around a stand of pines. But over the years the headliners in men’s golf, from Nick Faldo to Zach Johnson, haven’t all been long-ball hitters or physics-defying shotmakers.

Golf relies on creativity, guile and guts, all of which women have in equal parts to men.

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