No straightforward answer, yet subtle clues

There were a multitude of reasons I was interested in the “Ladies Leading Turf” presentation at the 2024 GCSAA Conference and Trade Show, but one nagging question attracted me to the event: How on earth can we draw more women into our industry?

I’m now in my 23rd year as superintendent at the same golf course. During all those years of posting open crew positions and hiring people to fill them, I’ve had a total of four women enter the shop in response to an ad. I hired all four.

I recently did the math and came up with a number in the neighborhood of 200 hires during my first 22 years on the job. Four out of 200 is 2 percent.

In fact, if I were to go back to every golf course I’ve worked at since entering the business in 1988 — six courses over 36 years — I can count on three hands (if I had three hands) the total number of women I have worked alongside on golf course maintenance crews.

Since becoming a superintendent and the sole person in charge of hiring, I’ve wondered if there was something I could or should be doing to attract more women to these open positions. I’ve been seeking some little piece of wisdom I was missing that could help me do more to spark some diversity at my own workplace.

There were three guest panelists at this year’s Ladies Leading Turf presentation at the GCSAA show — and Leah Withrow stole the show for me. I think it might be because a lot of us in the audience could relate to her story: She’s the head groundskeeper at a baseball stadium in Reno, Nevada. She also has an ability to honestly share the struggles and frustrations that she has dealt with being a woman in such a male-dominated industry. Her insight was authentic and direct.

Leah’s baseball field, Greater Nevada Field, home of the Triple-A Reno Aces, recently won the prestigious Professional Baseball Field of the Year award given by the Sports Field Management Association. No small feat, as this honor encompasses all professional baseball fields, including major-league fields.

Although I left the presentation in Phoenix feeling better about women making more of an impact on our industry, and thinking the future is only going to get more diverse, I still had no answer to my big question: What could I do as a superintendent to get more women to apply to our open positions when we post them? That question, specifically, was the one I had wanted answered. And I left feeling I did not have that answer.

I felt like I needed to talk directly with Leah. She was kind enough to arrange a time to chat on the phone a few months after the show.

“That’s the question everyone asks me: How do we get more women into the industry?” she says. “But to be honest, I don’t know where all the women are who don’t want to do it. But I do feel like there would be more women interested in getting into this field if it was marketed toward us. It’s just not.”

She continued this point by sharing just how hard it is for women not in the turf industry to see themselves in it.

“When I started researching this as a possible field I wanted to go into and make a career out of, it was all men in the magazines and books I looked up. When I went to college, it was all men in the classrooms. It was all men in the textbooks. When I started working in the field, it was all men I was working with.

“Even with ads, it was all men in the research ads, the fertilizer ads, the irrigation ads. And I get it. Companies are generally targeting their ads at the people who use their products. And for the most part those customers are men. But I think it helps to see companies using women more now. Just so that we can see somebody doing it who we can relate to.”

When I asked Leah if she had any advice for what I could personally do to facilitate more women coming through my door to answer a job posting, she again didn’t have a silver bullet answer. Which makes sense. If we knew exactly how to fix the lack of diversity in our industry, I’m pretty sure many of us would have done that by now. But it’s not simple. It’s complicated and it’s layered.

But then she said something that, for me at any rate, was a game-changer. I felt that she did leave me with something to consider for my own situation.

Leah talked about culture, and what our culture perhaps looks like to a woman interested in working on a golf course. That culture resides in the maintenance shop itself and within the most-likely-male-dominated crews we oversee.

“I’ve only been around a handful of golf maintenance crew,” she says, “but I have noticed some are better than others. Some of the cultures are just generally geared more toward keeping women out of the shop. You kind of feel that energy. You sense that energy. When guys are standoffish and not accepting, that doesn’t go unnoticed.”

She told me an honest story about what this looked like to her.

“I remember getting my uniform once when I started a job, and our gameday polo we were required to wear, the only shirt they had for me was a men’s medium,” she says. “I wear a women’s extra small, so that was extremely large for me. Not only do I already stand out, now I’m wearing a shirt that’s five sizes too big. Now I really stand out. I don’t feel comfortable. I’m trying to tie and tuck so it’s not just falling out of everything. I’m trying to do my job. I mean it can come down to something simple like that, or just having a locker room that I can go into and feel comfortable in. It takes such little effort on people’s part and a lot of men just don’t consider or realize the impact it has on a woman.

“I think the best thing you can do is making sure you run a shop that has a culture that’s embracing of a woman coming in and not making her feel even more weird in the situation than she probably does already.”

Changing the culture. This made so much sense. I don’t know that I ever considered our shop and the culture of our shop before in regard to how it must look to a woman.

But I certainly will now.

Ron Furlong is the golf course superintendent at Avalon Golf Club in Washington and a frequent Golf Course Industry contributor.