Sammamish Women’s PGA Championship takes aim at gender pay gap

The best female golfers in the world are in town this week for the prestigious KPMG Women’s PGA Championship.

Not only is there a lot riding on it for the players, but organizers say it’s a significant event for women’s sports and for women in business in general.

The entire golf world will be watching the tournament at Sahalee in Sammamish, which got underway early Thursday morning and runs through Sunday.

Former University of Washington golfing great and Golf Channel analyst Paige Mackenzie says it can have a tremendous impact on future generations.

“I was a little girl and I remember going to Meridian Valley [in Kent] and watching the Safeco Classic, and I remember watching Patty Sheehan win. and I swear, Annika [Sorenstam] looked right at me on the 13th hole and I remember that. And it was meaningful to me,” Mackenzie said.

The KPMG Women’s PGA Championship is far more than just another golf tournament.

It’s one of five so-called majors, and the only one put on in conjunction with the PGA. The PGA oversees the game, from the top players to your local teaching pro.

PGA CEO Pete Bevacqua says it’s a significant step in helping bring more equity to women’s sports with a multi-million dollar prize purse, major corporate support from KPMG, Microsoft, and others, and global network TV coverage.

“In our offices, we put up I’d say two-to-three times life-size posters of our champions. And they were all men. And we said, you know what, we’re talking about diversity , we’re talking about everything we can do to grow the game initiatives to bring girls into the game, to bring women into the game, that’s not right, we need something else,” Bevacqua said.

But there’s far more going on behind the scenes and off the course with the tournament. The timing coincides with a number of other major moves involving women’s sports.

Five prominent members of the U.S. Women’s national soccer team recently filed an official wage discrimination suit against US Soccer. Former UW star and local hero Hope Solo was among those arguing they are unfairly paid far less than their male counterparts.

And despite winning four straight national college basketball championships and being drafted number one by the Seattle Storm, Breanna Stewart will only make around $100,000 for playing in the WNBA. Yet she’ll make about $1.5 million to play in Europe.

So she fully backs the move by the U.S. Women’s team, as well as other initiatives to narrow the gap.

“It doesn’t really make a lot of sense because we’re playing the same sports, we’re doing the same things, basically,” said Stewart, widely acknowledged as the one of the best women’s basketball players in the world.

“As a female athlete, anytime there’s something that’s happening for our benefit, or making us more equal to what the men are doing, we’re happy about that. As females, we’re fighting together on this,” Stewart said.

Organizers of the tournament hope it’s a major catalyst to help narrow the wage gap in the working world as well.

KPMG Chair John Veimayer says a key component is the Women’s Leadership Summit — an event yesterday at Sahalee that featured hundreds of female executives, rising business stars, athletes and others aimed at coming up with significant new initiatives and strategies to elevate women in business.

Among them, reinvesting money made on the tournament into future gender equity efforts.

“It’s not just what we do on the course, playing the championship with the leadership summit, but it’s what the proceeds of this championship are going to do to really continue to develop that next generation of women leaders,” Veimayer said.

Follow @http://twitter.com/joshkerns38