http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/sports/golf/royal-and-ancient-golf-club-votes-to-admit-women.html 2014-09-18 20:50:48 Royal and Ancient Golf Club Votes to Admit Women The Scottish club had been under pressure to open its membership beyond the current 2,400 men. Members voted by proxy from around the world on Thursday. === ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — A coastal fog hung over the Old Course for much of the day Thursday, forcing golfers to strain to follow their shots. But clarity of a historic nature emerged just a few yards from the first tee, where the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, often called the sport’s spiritual home, voted overwhelmingly to admit its first female members. Peter Dawson, the chief executive of the R&A;, revealed the results of a postal balloting of the club’s 2,400 male members, many of whom were on site in matching blue jackets and patterned blue ties with the St. Andrews Links emblem. About three-quarters of the members participated in the voting, with 85 percent of them opting to approve women as members. The policy will take effect immediately, and the club said some women would be put on a fast track for membership to avoid having to spend time on the long waiting list. The vote was called after the 260-year-old club, which has long been a primary seat of power in golf, came under international pressure to open its membership to women. Scrutiny of all-male clubs everywhere has increased since the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, which hosts the Masters, accepted two women as members in 2012: Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, and Darla Moore, a South Carolina businesswoman. In an odd twist of timing, the decision was announced on the same day that Scots flocked to the polls to vote on whether to secede from the United Kingdom. The vote at St. Andrews was a collective, corporate effort, unlike in the early 1900s, when Britain’s suffragist movement spelled out, “No Votes, No Golf,” in sulfuric acid on select courses and threatened to target the Old Course. St. Andrews has long been accorded an almost reverential status in the sport, with one of the world’s oldest courses set along the North Sea just northeast of Edinburgh. Its stone clubhouse is one of the most recognizable features in golf, and it has hosted the British Open 28 times, more than any other club. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club in 2004 created a separate governing body, called the R&A;, which is entrusted with running the British Open and helping adjudicate the rules of golf. That body includes many of the same people as the club itself, and the male-only membership had become an anachronism that cast the club in an unfavorable light with fans and sponsors. It also undermined one of the main mandates of the R&A;, which is to grow the game. Earlier this year, Giles Morgan, a spokesman for one of the Open’s patrons, HSBC, said it was “a very uneasy position for the bank” to be associated with an event held at a male-only establishment. The R&A; has three clubs in the Open’s rotation with male-only membership — Muirfield, Royal St. George’s and Royal Troon, the 2016 host club. Before the 2013 British Open at Muirfield, Dawson bristled at the suggestion that the R&A; was essentially condoning sexism by holding its flagship event at male-only clubs. He described golf clubs as places where “like-minded men or, indeed, like-minded women” gather “and do their thing together” and said single-sex golf clubs were “just kind of, for some people, a way of life that they rather like.” Within months Dawson had changed his position and was advocating behind the scenes for women to be admitted to the club, his change of position perhaps influenced by the unease expressed by corporate patrons like HSBC. Speaking in January at an HSBC-sponsored event in Abu Dhabi, Morgan said, “When you are showcasing one of the world’s greatest tournaments, it would be much more palatable if it were played where there is not a sense of segregation.” From a pragmatic standpoint, the club’s gender bias undercut the ability of the St. Andrews University principal, or president, to conduct business. The head of the university, the oldest in Scotland, is a woman, Louise Richardson, who could not take visiting donors for a meal at the clubhouse. In an interview with The Times in May, Richardson delineated the difference between socializing with like-minded individuals and discriminatory policies. “What’s different is when people are excluded from access to something unique by a category to which they’re assigned or have no control, that’s access to a unique set of privileges and that’s different than going for a drink with your buddies,” she said. Richardson said she had not been wholly excluded from the club. “People have said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take you to lunch,’ ” she said. “But I’ve said, ‘I’m not eating in the clubhouse until women can enter.’ ”