Before I get too far into things I want to specify that this thread is meant to be about the 90% of female golfers, not the select few accomplished golfers who are not all that negatively impacted by the status quo. Pretty much any golfer over a single digit who can't drive the ball 200 yards and cannot effectivly play the 5000+ yrd "red tees". In addition a lot of this should also apply to young kids as well.
It's no secret that the avenger woman is one of the most neglected throughout the industry. It's completely unreasonable to expect someone whose AVERAGE drive is under 180yrds to play 18 holes from 5400+ yards, and in reality tons of these golfers are driving the ball far less than that. I'll concede that this isn't exactly a secret, although very little has been done to make the game accessible to this disenfranchised group.
At one point you've all heard someone say "the course is designed to play from the tips", but I've never heard someone say the course is designed to play from 4000 yards. Since this issue isn't exactly a secret I've seen a few courses (long after they were built) toss in an extra pair of tees at a reasonable distance for these golfers, but these tees are just an afterthought. Nothing went into the course design to even consider how these golfers might play the course. A golfer playing a par 4 from the 7200 yard tees, and a golfer playing the same hole from the 4000 yard tees are going to interact with the hole completely differently, and play completely different shots. Hazards that the golfer playing from the tips is trying to carry, the 4000 yard golfer may already be in front of. The angles might be different, and in no way should their second shots be from the same spot (If the 4000 yard golfers ball isn't much closer to the hole its a fail), so once again the shots are going to be (or at least should be) completely different. From a design standpoint tons of thought goes into what the next shot is going to look like for a 280 yard drive from the tips, but from what I've seen very little has gone into how the hole is going to play from the 4000 yard tees.
This brings me to my point that within the golf courses that you and I play everyday there exists a much smaller golf course for those who need to play from those distances, and more often than not that smaller golf course is far inferior to the longer one that you and i are playing. Just because a hole is a good hole from 420 yards does not mean that It is a good hole from 230 yards. The more i started thinking about this the more I started paying attention to these tees (if the course happens to have them) and i realized that many of these "great" courses that get awarded Top 100 rankings or high Doak scores are not necessarily great from the playability standpoint of the majority of women golfers. Has there ever been a Women's Top 100 list? If so I can imagine that it might look very different from the ones we are used to seeing.
I do realize that from a design standpoint this is very difficult. How do you make a hole "great" for every type of golfer? Adding variables makes designing a hole more difficult, which is why there are more "great" par 3s than par 5s. I just don't think that the forward women's tees should be an afterthought, which they are in so many situations.
In Britain i've seen courses set the ladies tees close to the mens tees, and just bump par up a stroke or two. While its a nice sentiment this does nothing in creating good golf holes/courses for this group of golfers. #notasolution
More consideration needs to be made to building golf courses that not only have shorter tee boxes, but actually offer all the same strategy and variety that we use to determine greatness, from all distances.
I hear "grow the game" all the time, and I believe that there are plenty of women who want to jump in the game, but in too many instances the actually playing of the game is far to inaccessible. Should Lydia Ko or Brooke Henderson or any other LPGA golfer create a similar golf boom comparable for to Tiger's, but for women, golf courses need to be ready if we are to truly grow the game.