Club Officials: "Number of Female Inherited Members Expected to Increase"
Human Rights Commission: "Not a Reasonable Cause... Discriminatory Act"
A complaint was filed with the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) alleging that a golf club restricts the admission of women as 'full members.' The NHRCK judged this policy as discriminatory and recommended improvements.
According to the NHRCK on the 11th, a complainant recently attempted to purchase a membership at Golf Club A for his wife but was rejected after being told by the club that "full membership admission is limited to men." The complainant viewed this decision by the golf club as discriminatory and filed a complaint with the NHRCK.
In response, the golf club operator explained, "Although the number of female visitors has surged, the current facility conditions lack sufficient lockers for women," adding that facility expansion would be possible only after securing additional land and reconstruction. They also stated that about 42% of full members are aged 70 or older, and it is expected that female full membership will increase through inheritance of memberships by this group, so admissions of female full members outside of inheritance are currently restricted.
However, the NHRCK’s Discrimination Remedy Committee pointed out that the club uses 38 male lockers as female lockers once or twice a week in addition to the existing female lockers according to the gender ratio of visitors by day, and thus found it difficult to accept the claim that there is insufficient capacity in the facilities.
The golf club has 75 female lockers, accounting for about 15% of the total. Meanwhile, female full members constitute only 2.7% of all members. In other words, there is no justifiable reason to restrict female members under the current circumstances.
Furthermore, without providing objective data, the "restriction on female full membership admission outside of inheritance" is difficult to justify. Considering these points comprehensively, the restriction on female full membership admission was judged to be discriminatory without reasonable grounds.
The NHRCK explained, "This decision is significant in confirming that even if the golf club was established in the 1980s considering men as the main customers, restricting female full membership admission outside of inheritance solely due to facility conditions without reasonable grounds constitutes discriminatory conduct infringing on the right to equality based on gender."
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