Research puts a number on women's golf retention

A survey of 419 women who had been through the Operation 36 programme in the United States and Canada found that introducing incremental play raised the number playing and practising weekly by 54 per cent. The figure was presented at a Golf Genius webinar attended by 267 people from 21 countries.

Golf Ireland was among the governing bodies represented, alongside The R&A, Scottish Golf, England Golf, Golf Australia and the Japan Golf Association. So were 132 golf clubs. The panel included Molly Moore and Alistair Spink of love.golf, Matt Reagan of Operation 36 and Mark Smith of Stamford Golf Club, who between them have helped create 240,000 new participants worldwide, 96,000 of them women and girls.

The more uncomfortable numbers came from a live poll of the people watching. Just under half said their organisation had a target for increasing female participation. Twenty-three per cent said they ran no women's or girls' programmes at all. Forty-four per cent were tracking whatever they did run on manual workflows, with only five per cent using a dedicated participation dashboard.

The session covered three themes: the part experiences play in building a habit, the coach as the anchor of a community, and how incremental learning drives retention.