Can Membership at Augusta Cost Your Company Millions?

It probably goes without saying that anyone who has followed the game of golf over the last several years has heard the name Martha Burk. In 2002, Burk, the former chairwoman of the National Council of Women’s Organization (NCWO), led a campaign to open the gates of the Augusta National Golf Club to women members. Although the efforts of Burk and the NCWO did not succeed in establishing a single woman member at Augusta, their work has since developed into the “Women on Wall Street” project. This initiative targeted many of the nation’s largest financial institutions whose top executives were members of Augusta, and has led to several gender discrimination lawsuits against these institutions. (See www.AugustaDiscriminates.org for information on the Augusta Controversy and the NCWO).

One of the early targets of the “Women on Wall Street” project was Morgan Stanley. When the class-action lawsuit was filed against Morgan Stanley, former chief executive, Philip Purcell, and several members of Morgan Stanley’s board of directors were members of Augusta. The lawsuit recently settled for a reported $46 million, to be distributed among a class of 2,700 female financial advisers. A similar action against Smith Barney is currently pending in the courts. The “Women on Wall Street” initiative has also targeted other major institutions headed by members of Augusta, such as American Express, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Prudential, Franklin Templeton and Berkshire Hathaway.

If you are interested in this topic the NCWO provides a yearly breakdown of events (2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006), plus you can find lots of information online (very little of which is impartial). Heck, Amazon even offers a book on the topic!

David Dawsey – Monitoring Golf Industry Lawsuits