Why More Female Executives Don’t Play Golf—and Why That’s a Problem
According to a new study, women miss out on a lot of networking opportunities by not playing the game
3 min
Female executives face all sorts of barriers when it comes to using one of the great networking tools for business: golf.
That’s according to a new study, identifying some of the benefits female executives derive from playing golf, as well as the reasons more female executives don’t golf. The study’s authors conducted a content analysis, reviewing almost 100 articles from academic journals, trade publications, general-interest publications and golf associations.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Deborah Gray, a professor of marketing at Central Michigan University and one of the study’s co-authors, about the research. Here are edited excerpts of the conversation.
WSJ: What were your overall conclusions?
DR. GRAY: Golf is so much different than other networking activities. The game takes hours, and gives you a chance to learn about someone’s life and personality. You learn how they react when things are not going well. You also get a sense of their integrity by seeing if they are honest on the course. Not surprisingly, many executives say their careers benefit from playing golf. We found one article stating that 71% of Fortune 1000 CEOs reported doing business with someone they met on the golf course, and another article that said 80% of Fortune 500 executives say golf has helped their career.
But only about a quarter of all golfers are women. That’s a problem because women’s careers may benefit just as much as their male counterparts. By not golfing, women not only miss out on the experience but also conversations about the experience. They also miss out on the chance to be more visible within their organisation, converse with decision makers and put themselves in a better position for promotions.
WSJ: Your literature review also found that men and women often network differently.
DR. GRAY: Academic researchers have found women’s networks tend to include people who are more like themselves, whereas men’s networks tend to be less homogeneous and more strategic and include more powerful people. One way men create more diverse networks is through golf. They connect with business associates over shared interest rather than a common background. Women should do that, too.
WSJ: What are some of the barriers female executives may face when it comes to using golf as a networking tool?
DR. GRAY: Women often have unequal access to leisure time. Female executives may be caring for children and ageing parents in addition to their professional responsibilities. Consequently, they may prioritize paid work during business hours and skip networking opportunities. That’s especially true for golf because it is very time consuming. Playing 18 holes of golf can take four to five hours.
WSJ: Are there any barriers specific to the game of golf?
DR. GRAY: Female executives may also spend more time worrying that they are not strong enough or good enough to play with male colleagues. But most people are just average golfers. According to the USGA, the average man’s handicap is 14.1 and the average women’s handicap is 28, which is a long way from being a scratch golfer.
Those numbers from the USGA also suggest that the average woman swings her club 12 more times over a round of golf, which isn’t a lot of waiting time over 18 holes, especially if the ball is hit right down the fairway. A common misconception is that higher-handicap golfers, often assumed to be women, are slower golfers. But golfers with low handicaps can be slow, too. The key for any golfer is knowing when to pick up the ball.
But the idea that women play slower has been used by private golf clubs to exclude women from playing during popular times on the golf course, like Saturday morning, though the practice is now changing. Other parts of the game can be updated to be more inclusive. For instance, the forward-most tee is still frequently called the woman’s tee, though some courses now suggest that someone’s handicap dictates where they tee off. Male executives shouldn’t just assume their female colleagues will tee off at a different spot.
WSJ: Aren’t more women starting to play golf?
DR. GRAY: Major golf associations, including the LPGA, are running marketing campaigns to increase the number of women playing golf. These associations are also trying to get more girls to start playing the game. Girls now make up about 36% of all golfers ages 6 to 17 years old. But corporate America could definitely do more to get women into the game.
WSJ: What can companies do to encourage more female golfers?
DR. GRAY: Companies could teach employees more about networking and include golf as part of their training. They could even help employees evaluate gaps in their network and identify key people who can help them accomplish their career goals. I tell my business students to think about a round of golf like any other business meeting, and consider their objectives beforehand. After all, few people would go into a meeting without an agenda. Companies could also sponsor golf lessons at local courses. The key is that it happens during the workday, just like other professional development activities, encouraging people who tend to skip after-hour events to participate. Lessons and clinics also provide opportunities for employee team building, so there are many reasons for employers to think about sponsoring golf lessons.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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