Shooting for even par
On January 22 of this year, a young Canadian golfer named Brooke Henderson won the Hilton Grand Vacations tournament in Orlando, Florida, against all the other women who had won LPGA (Ladies’ Professional Golf Association) titles the previous year. Two weeks before, in Hawaii, a young Spanish golfer named Jon Rahm won a similar tournament, against all the male golfers who won on the PGA tour in 2022.
For her victory, Henderson won a respectable sum of $225,000 USD. For his, Rahm won $2.7 million USD. Eleven hundred per cent more. Put another way, Henderson’s prize money was a little more than eight per cent of Rahm’s, for a victory of identical stature in the sport.
The recent debate about pay equity for women in professional sport has been led by the Canadian women’s soccer team. I doubt if the discrepancy between their pay, and those of the men’s national team, is anywhere close to 1,100 per cent. That said, I agree there should be no discrepancy, and I feel the same way about Henderson vs. Rahm.
In case you’re tempted to point out that Henderson’s achievements in her sport don’t match those of our women soccer players, let me point out that Brooke is, at 25, the most successful Canadian professional golfer in history. The Hilton tournament was her 13th victory. The previous record, for either men or women, was eight. Jon Rahm, by contrast, is three years older and has won three fewer PGA tournaments. Henderson has been ranked among the world’s top 10 female golfers for the last six years.
Another dramatic contrast is between Henderson and Canada’s male professional golfers. There are currently seven of them with status on the PGA Tour. Five have won tournaments (Henderson is the only Canadian woman currently competing who can say that). But none of them are even close in the number of victories; two have won twice, the rest only once.
In a recent tournament, the Players in Florida, two Canadian men, Adam Svensson and Adam Hadwin, ended up tied for 13th place, a full 10 strokes behind the winner. And what did they win for 13th place? Almost $460,000, more than twice as much as Henderson did for her prestigious four-stroke victory two months earlier.
In many sports, such as baseball or football, women have a very low profile at the top professional level, so their arguments for pay equity are not so strong. In sports like hockey or basketball, however, Canadian women compete at a very high level, and the professional leagues in which they play which deserve much higher media exposure. With such exposure should come higher salaries. Professional athletes usually defend their obscenely lucrative contracts by saying that they are not just athletes, they’re entertainers, so they deserve to be compensated to the same agree as actors or musicians. Assuming that’s a good argument, then it should follow that if women soccer players or golfers provide an equal level of entertainment, they should be equally paid. So why doesn’t that happen?
Sometimes it does. For instance, the four Grand Slam events in tennis have long provided equal prize money for men and women, although a lot of other events through the year can’t say the same (like Canada’s Rogers Cup). In alpine skiing, men and women are usually paid the same. In fact, in a 2017 study of 44 “professional” sports worldwide, the BBC found that only eight still persisted in gender discrimination. Unfortunately, they are also the sports with the highest participation or spectator rates, generating the highest advertising revenue, and by extrapolation the highest salaries or prize money.
To a large extent, the blame can be laid at the feet of the ever-expanding sports media universe, for largely ignoring women’s professional sports. On my cable menu, TSN has ten channels, but most of them show duplicate coverage. Why? If I was a basketball or hockey nut, I would probably happily watch a women’s game, particularly if it featured Canadian athletes.
On the Golf Channel, you can sometimes find coverage of a women’s tournament, but unless it’s a “major,” it’s usually way down the priority list, behind the European Tour, the seniors tour, the minor leagues, even college golf. There’s no excuse for that. After too many years under male leadership, the LPGA has a dynamic new commissioner, Mollie Marcoux (a former hockey player!), and her principal focus should be increased media coverage. Everything else will follow.
Brooke Henderson has already made more money in her brief career than Jack Nicklaus ever dreamed of. But it’s all relative. In virtually identical tournaments, her winning cheque was eight per cent the size of Jon Rahm’s. That’s ridiculous.