In May 2016, the members of The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers voted on whether to admit women to their club. Sixty-four percent said yes. The motion failed.
To understand why that sentence contains a paradox — and why its resolution would reshape the politics of elite golf for a decade — you have to understand what Muirfield is, what the Honourable Company represents, and what the R&A's response signalled to every private golf club on the planet.
The Oldest Golf Club in the World Claims It Isn't
The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers was formally constituted in 1744 — thirteen rules of golf, written at Leith, bearing the first codified laws of the game. This was ten years before St Andrews formed its own society. The R&A's founding document came later. By any academic measure, the Honourable Company has the strongest claim to being the oldest golf club in existence.
They will not tell you this themselves. The Honourable Company is conspicuously quiet about its own primacy. The members are patrician, understated, and deeply resistant to the kind of institutional chest-beating that marks most heritage organisations. They play their golf on one of Scotland's finest links, host the occasional Open Championship, and conduct themselves with a restraint that is, in its own way, more impressive than any branding exercise.
This restraint made the 2016 vote all the more seismic. When news leaked that 64% of members had voted to admit women, but that this had failed because the club's constitution required a two-thirds majority, the response from the outside world was immediate, unified, and furious.
The Timeline
1744
The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers is formally constituted at Leith, writing the first 13 rules of golf. The membership is, by the conventions of the era, exclusively male.
1891
The club moves to its current home at Muirfield, East Lothian — a Harry Colt-routed links considered one of the fairest and most genuinely challenging championship courses in the world.
May 2016
Members vote on whether to admit women. 64% vote in favour — a clear majority but below the constitutional threshold of 66.6%. The motion fails. The outside world is informed simultaneously of both the vote and the outcome.
May 2016 (days later)
The R&A announces that it will not stage The Open Championship at venues that do not admit women as members. Muirfield is removed from the Open rota. The statement is brief, unequivocal, and unprecedented.
March 2017
A second ballot is held. With 93% of members participating, 80.2% vote to admit women. The constitution is changed. The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers admits its first female members after 273 years.
2022
Muirfield hosts the AIG Women's Open Championship. Georgia Hall, Charley Hull, and the world's best women players compete on the same course that had refused women members five years earlier. The symbolism is not lost on anyone involved.
What the R&A Actually Did
It is easy to summarise the R&A's intervention as a progressive organisation disciplining a reactionary club. The reality is more nuanced and more interesting.
The R&A had its own chequered history on gender at exactly the same time. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews — the members' club that shares the Old Course with the R&A, the governing body — did not admit women until 2014. For two centuries, the club that effectively controlled world golf governance excluded women from its own membership while governing a sport played by millions of women worldwide.
When the R&A removed Muirfield from the Open rota in 2016, it was therefore not simply a question of moral leadership. It was also a question of commercial reality. The Open Championship is one of the most watched golf events in the world. Its sponsors, broadcasters, and commercial partners operate in an environment of 21st-century stakeholder expectation. A major championship hosted at a men-only private club was, by 2016, commercially and reputationally unsustainable regardless of any governance body's personal views on the matter.
The R&A's statement was clear: they would not use their commercial and prestige leverage to platform single-sex private clubs. This was not a demand that private clubs change their membership rules. It was a decision about which venues the R&A would choose to endorse with the world's most prestigious golf tournament. The distinction matters.
The Rump Faction
The 36% who voted against female membership in 2016 were not, as some media coverage implied, a monolithic block of unreconstructed reactionaries. Several who voted no reportedly did so on procedural grounds — that the question had been introduced with insufficient membership debate, that the timeline was rushed, or that a 64% majority was genuinely not sufficient for a constitutional change of such significance.
Some of these members subsequently voted yes in the 2017 ballot, contributing to the 80.2% majority. The shift from 64% to 80.2% in ten months reflects not a change of principle but a change of presentation. The second ballot followed an extended period of member engagement, formal discussion, and — critically — the lived experience of watching the club be stripped of Open Championship status and the international reputational consequences that followed.
The lesson for institutions managing similar governance questions is clear: process matters as much as principle. The Honourable Company's 2016 vote failed not because most members opposed change, but because the process did not generate sufficient support for change to meet a constitutional threshold.
Muirfield Today — What You Need to Know as a Visitor
None of this recent history diminishes what Muirfield is as a golf course. Harry Colt's original routing, refined over subsequent decades, remains one of the most architecturally satisfying championship layouts in Scotland. Unlike many links courses that route out along the coast and back in a straight line, Muirfield's two concentric loops — the outer nine running clockwise, the inner nine anti-clockwise — means the wind comes from a different direction on virtually every hole. You cannot play with the wind in your face all day. You cannot benefit from the wind all day. The routing enforces balance.
Visitors are welcome Tuesdays and Thursdays only. Handicap requirement: 18 for men, 24 for women. Green fees are among the highest in Scotland — contact the club directly for confirmed 2026 pricing. The dress code is strict: jacket and tie in the clubhouse dining room. The post-round lunch in the dining room, included in the visitor package, is one of Scottish golf's genuine institutional pleasures.
