The US Women’s Open, a record eight-figure purse, and the thorny topic of the gender pay gap
Gender pay gaps, in sports and the wider world, have received lots of attention in recent years, and it came up again this week, just as the richest event in women's golf history takes place.
First, a warning: This article may be triggering. Especially if you’re someone who believes that the gender pay gap in sports is something easily addressed by sponsors and governing bodies.
Now, with that out of the way, let’s get started.
The US Women’s Open started at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club in North Carolina today, and it did so with a splash: the largest purse in history for a women’s golf tournament.
Photo: Darren Carroll / USGA
The $10m on offer, which includes a $1.8m payout for the winner, is a markup of more than 80% on last year’s total fund of $5.5m.
You can be sarky and point to the general jumps in inflation since the start of 2022 as one reason that golf tournaments are getting a cash bump this year — in the men’s game, the first two Majors of the year, the Masters and the PGA, both received a major cash injection with purses jumping to $15m each (up from the 2021 figures of $11.5m and $12m respectively), the Players Championship became the richest event in history when it announced a $20m purse in March and that record isn’t going to last long, with next week’s debut event on the controversial Saudi-backed LIV Series in London splitting $25m between a limited field (some would say very limited) of 48.
As inflation goes, that is fairly eye-watering.
The general inflation rates for us great unwashed, based on a basket of common goods known as the “consumer prize index”, has passed 8% in recent months (and the Bank of England expects it to hit 10% this year).
In terms of pro golf tournament purse, the rate of inflation this year has been:
33.3% for the Players Championship ($15m to $20m)
30.4% for the Masters ($11.5m to $15m)
25% for the PGA Championship ($12m to $15m)
We’ll come back to the women’s game in a moment, but let’s pull this thread a little more.
The pandemic and the billionaire class
One undeniable consequence of the 2020 pandemic, and particularly the mass money-printing undertaken by Governments around the world, has been a widening of the wealth inequality gap.
In its most basic terms, when you roll out a stimulus programme that gives everyone a temporary injection of cash, vast volumes of that cash pass through the poorest people to the richest.
Often, the richest sections of society become the richest sections of society through some or all of (a) investment, (b) ingenuity, (c) innovation and (d) relentless efficiencies that make their inbound cashflows smoother.
Twelve months ago, the Financial Times carried an article from Ruchir Sharma, the chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, titled “The billionaire boom: how the super-rich soaked up Covid cash”.
In it, Sharma wrote:
As the virus spread, central banks injected $9tn into economies worldwide, aiming to keep the world economy afloat. Much of that stimulus has gone into financial markets, and from there into the net worth of the ultra-rich. The total wealth of billionaires worldwide rose by $5tn to $13tn in 12 months, the most dramatic surge ever registered on the annual billionaire list compiled by Forbes magazine.
While it is a leap from the world’s richest men people to the prize money on offer to the world’s top golfers, it is part of a compelling trend that includes these two statements of fact:
All over the world, the purchasing power of money — the dollar, the euro, the pound, etc. — is considerably less now than it was a year or two ago
All over the world, money flows much quicker from the poorest to the richest than Governments can fully address
The richest people control the richest organizations, and the richest organizations feather the nests they enjoy feathering, whether it’s the glitz and glamour of bringing a round of Formula 1 to Jeddah, or bringing successive football World Cups to Russia and Qatar, or making sure the biggest bucks in sponsorship (and, downstream from there, prize money) are ploughed into the most prestigious, lucrative and highest profile events in the game many wealthy, weighty businessmen people like to play: golf.
Gender pay gaps in sport
That lengthy aside of global capital flows at least partially dealt with, let’s return to this week’s US Women’s Open, the richest purse in the history of the women’s game, and what this says about sport and its gender pay gaps.
Firstly, the clamour about gender pay gaps around the world has identified a real situation: women are, in general, paid less than men.
This has resulted in everything from a major Government initiative in Ireland, which is forcing companies with 250 or more employees to formally go through a process to clarify their gender pay gap and what they intend to do about it, to studies like that published by the New York university Adelphi University in 2021.
The study sifted through data relating to pro sports globally, and produced what look at first glance like damning statistics showing the difference in earnings between the top male and female professional athletes.
On average, according to a list sourced from Forbes above, the top five male sports stars in terms of earnings, made a shade over $105m each in 2019, compared with an average of $17m for the top five women.
That gap — more than 600% in percentage terms — is a stark one.
Those top five female earners are all, it must be said, tennis players.
When we drill down into golf, the differences are starker still: the data gathered by Adelphi (sourced from PGA and LPGA money lists on ESPN, and the links are now broken) showed that the average earnings on the LPGA tour was less than $49,000, just 1/25 — or 4% — of the average earnings on the PGA Tour.
Against the backdrop of these figures, the prize money at the US Women’s Open this week suddenly looks a lot better.
World number three and two-time Major winner Lydia Ko was reportedly quick to point out that “there’s is still a way to go” before anything close to parity is reached, but the progress has been monumental, and fast.
A significant reason for that progress is the increased media exposure and attention the women’s game has received in recent years.
A direct line can be drawn to a six-year-old formal “strategic alliance” between the two governing bodies, which the PGA and LPGA entered into in 2016 and which was brought to bear on the renegotiation of media rights in 2020, which fully came into being in 2022.
Part of that agreement was enhanced TV coverage, with more LPGA tour events screened by NBC and CBS in the US than ever before.
The combination of quality at the top and increased mainstream coverage is a virtuous circle that will keep on generating positive momentum. One example was a dramatic Solheim Cup in autumn 2021, in which Europe outgunned the heavily favoured home side in Toledo, Ohio, generating further media attention and double-underlining the quality at the top of the women’s game.
One key piece of the pay gap jigsaw, though, and a piece that is rarely if ever discussed in public, but which is critical to the reality of the situation, is simply this:
Money always follows perceived value.
It must be stressed that it’s not the case that money always follows value. Money often follows value, but it is indisputable that money always follows perceived value.
Perceived value is the reason an estimated $250bn dollars every year are spent on things like brand advertising and reputation management.
As David Ogilvy, the so-called Father of Advertising, once described brand as “the intangible sum of a product's attributes”, while Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s world’s richest man, has been quoted as saying, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
Perception creates reality. Brand is perception, and it is perception that generates the biggest paydays.
What are the attributes, then, of women’s golf as a product? What do people say about women’s golf when women’s pro golfers and administrators are not in the room?
We can judge, at least partly, from TV ratings.
In 2021, when Jon Rahm won the men’s US Open, ratings peaked at almost 9 million viewers on the Sunday evening and averaged 3.1 million over the four days, according to figures reported by Sports Media Watch.
In contrast, the final round of the 2019 US Women’s Open, won by Korea’s Lee Jeong-eun, attracted an average of just over 700,000 viewers — which Sports Media Watch said was the lowest ever for the event’s final round.
These are the challenges faced by the women’s game — and women’s sport in every country in the world.
They are challenges of perception and brand, and until the perception and brand of female sports and female sports stars is more closely aligned to the perception and brand of their male counterparts, the gender pay gap is certain to continue.
And (trigger warning) when basic biological science dictates that the strongest, fittest, fastest men will always be stronger, fitter and faster than the strongest, fittest, fastest women, the challenge of changing the perception and brand of the world’s top female sports stars may well prove an impossible nut to crack.
Leaving that aside, we should be clear on the fact that serious progress has been made for prize money in the women’s game: this weekend’s first ever eight-figure purse for a women’s golf event represents a massive step in upward mobility, if not the forever elusive commodity of parity.
The ethics of extreme earnings
Whether any of this is ethical or sustainable, well, that’s another matter entirely.
Because as we tried to outline in the first half of this article, the trend towards bigger and bigger pay days for the world’s elite — whether in business, or motor racing, or golf — is part of a trend that creates wider and wider inequality in the world as a whole.
Whether the quest to find that elusive gender pay parity (in sport or in the broader world) is in the end successful, what looks certain to happen is that more and more cash will end up in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
When Lydia Ko, or world number one Jin Young Ko, or America’s heroine Nelly Korda, or one of their fellow competitors claims the $1.8m top prize in North Carolina on Sunday, somebody somewhere will point out that it’s still well short of the $2.7m pocketed by Justin Thomas for winning the most recent men’s Major two weeks ago.
What this red herring overlooks is that for every Ko, Korda or Thomas, there are tens of millions of ordinary people — men and women both — trying to eke out a living on two jobs at minimum wage or below.
It’s easy to point out that arbitrary pay gaps exist, especially at the elite level, and lament that they do.
It’s a much more difficult job to leave aside the gender divisions for a moment and take a long hard look at the reasons for the gaping inequalities between top and bottom across all of western society, creating a ghetto class which gets heavily reinforced from generation to generation and out of which few people ever really manage to escape.