Golf as a case study of women's sport

Sport provides a means for personal achievement, community engagement, social and economic development, and to promote physical, social and mental well-being (Sport England 2024a).

In the UK, these positive benefits are supported through annual Government and National Lottery investment for the development of elite sport (UK Sport 2024) and grassroots sport (Sport England 2024b).

However, many women may not have the opportunity to achieve these social and economic benefits because funding, participation, career opportunities, and research are not equally distributed between men and women (Lebel et al. 2021).

At elite sporting events such as recent Olympic Games, women and men athletes were almost equally represented (Olympics.com 2021) and figures from the UK indicate that women make up approximately 49% of those who are active (Sport England 2024c). Despite this, women are underrepresented in other areas of sport.

For example, only 13% of coaches at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were female (Olympics.com 2021) and according to the Royal & Ancient Global Golf Participation Report 2023, worldwide adult women account for only 23% of registered golfers.

Furthermore, there is a dearth of knowledge specific to women's sport and an assumption that men and women and their sport contexts are the same (Emmonds et al. 2019; Lebel et al. 2021; Zhu et al. 2022).

Reviews of research such as Fink's (2015) exploration of research on the depictions of female athletes and women's sports in the media and LaVoi's (2016) multi-level examination of research on women in sport coaching illustrate progress in research focused specifically on women's sport. Despite this, however, knowledge gaps remain in virtually all aspects of women's sport.