BREAKING BOUNDARIES

GAP WEDGE

The income disparity between an LPGA and a PGA Tour professional is a solvable problem with a little help.

By Stacy Lewis Article | May 2017

GOLF IS A NUMBER GAME, PLAIN AND SIMPLE. The ball doesn’t know if you’re six-foot-six, 240 pounds or, like me, just 5-5, 132. Take the fewest strokes and you win—period. So, some numbers from last year. In 2016, the PGA TOUR leading money winner earned more than $9.3 million, while the LPGA Tour’s top earner pocketed just over $2.5 million. (He won three tournaments; she won five.) I earned $943,502, 16th on my tour—about one-quarter what No. 16 on the PGA Tour did, at $3.7 million. The trend only grows further down the line. No. 100 on the PGA Tour: $1.06 million. No. 100 on the LPGA Tour: a shade over $90,000, or less than 10 percent of her male counterpart. Endorsement deals paint a similar picture.

Is this wage gap due to a talent gap? Well, our most accurate driver hit 86 percent of fairways, or 13 percentage points more than the PGA Tour’s best did. Our leader in Greens in Regulation—approach-shot accuracy, basically—topped the PGA Tour’s leader by 7 percentage points. Our Scoring Average champion averaged 69.58 strokes per round, only about 0.4 more than the PGA Tour’s.

My point isn’t that women could compete successfully on the PGA Tour. It’s that women are playing the same game as men, at an equally high level. We work just as hard on and off the course. Bottom line: PGA Tour and LPGA Tour golfers are world-class athletes playing a sport as well as it’s ever been played, while engaging with their fans. Only women get paid a lot less.

...women are playing the same game as men, at an equally high level

- Stacy Lewis, LPGA Tour Star

The strong leadership of Commissioner Mike Whan and the LPGA Tour team and the growth of women’s golf in Asia are helping us trend in the right direction. So, too, is the support of companies dedicated to elevating women on and off the golf course, like KPMG, one of my sponsors.

They elevated one of our five Majors, the KPMG Women's PGA Championship, by raising the purse by $1.25 million—a 55% increase, hosting the event on world-class courses, and increasing exposure through partnering with NBC to televise weekend coverage. In addition, they established the KPMG Women’s Leadership Summit, held on site the week of the tournament, to incorporate the inspiring voices of powerful women leaders across multiple industries.

I’ve been very fortunate in my golf career, so my concern is for the next generation of players. The income gap in golf is as much a concern to me as the corporate income gap is to working women.

Challenging the status quo with grace, grit and composure

One key reason for golf’s wage gap is TV ratings. The PGA Tour has a lot more exposure than the LPGA Tour. We need more eyeballs on our game. Our deal with The Golf Channel has definitely helped in that effort, but we need network TV and other media outlets to showcase our product—our talents and our personalities. Once we pick up fans, we generally keep them for life. My strong hope is that we continue to raise awareness of golf’s income gap, both to golf’s stakeholders and allies in the corporate world, so that we can encourage purposeful work toward solutions that eliminate it.

Stacy Lewis has won 11 LPGA Tour titles, including two major championships.