Roughly three years ago, the PGA Tour asked senior executive Julie Tyson to head up a new employee resource group. Its mission was to serve workers who were members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.
Among other things, the initiative entailed the creation of something called the Prism Group, which according to tour officials was designed to “move the organization forward in a multitude of ways” in an effort to “change the social fabric of (that group) and the game of golf.”
The executive director of the Northern Trust tournament as well as the senior vice president of sales operations and strategy for the PGA Tour, Tyson moved quickly in her new position, as she continued to take care of her other responsibilities. That included establishing such new policies as domestic partner benefits coverage and gender affirming care, while establishing partnerships with LGBTQ groups and PGA Tour marketing campaigns featuring LGBTQ representation.
“We want to be held accountable.” – Julie Tyson
Tour insiders have been applauding her efforts. And now, outside institutions are recognizing what Tyson, who worked for six years at the LPGA as a vice president of strategic development before joining her current employer in 2007, has accomplished. Among those is the receipt of a 95 (out of 100) Corporate Equality Index score from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), making the PGA Tour the first major sports organization ever included.
Quite understandably, Tyson is pleased with the news. “I was honored to be asked to do this,” she told GGP/Biz. “And I am really proud of this for the PGA Tour.”
According to a release from that organization, the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index was launched in 2002 and since that time has become both a road map and bench-marking tool for U.S. businesses in the field of LGBTQ equality in the workplace. The hope of HRC officials is that by identifying emerging best practices in that realm, they can improve the experiences of LGBTQ employees in participating businesses.
Under Tyson’s leadership, the PGA Tour has been trying to accomplish that in a number of ways. For example, the tour became an official partner last fall of the Trevor Project, which is world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth. In the third quarter of 2020, the tour also began employee training focused on how to be an ally to the LGBTQ community. Later, it created and distributed gender transition guidelines for employees and managers and published an LGBTQ toolkit. And over the past three years, the organization has sponsored and publicly supported a number of LGBTQ-related events, such as the 1st Annual SF Pride Tournament at TPC Harding Park in 2019 and the tour’s first marketing campaign featuring LGBTQ representation through the Make Golf Your Thing initiative.
“We want to be held accountable,” Tyson said.
Through her efforts, the PGA Tour does just that.