Good Good Golf's last two weeks are a prime example of what happens when women aren’t in the room.
The media-and-apparel brand released a driver ad with Callaway that showed co-founder Garrett Clark shoving golfer Alexis Miestowski to the ground as a joke about not touching his equipment. The backlash was swift- Callaway ended its partnership, and CEO Matt Kendrick and president Joe Flannery both stepped down.
And the public reaction split sharply by gender, only about a third of consumers rated the ad inappropriate overall, but women were far more likely than men to disapprove, exactly the kind of gap that's easy to miss when the people greenlighting a campaign don't reflect the audience judging it.
That gap isn't just anecdotal, it shows up in the data, too. Companies with at least 30% female directors delivered cumulative returns 18.9% higher than those without, between mid-2019 and late 2024, and a 2025 review of more than 500 studies found consistent links between women on boards and stronger corporate transparency, social responsibility, and gender equity outcomes more broadly.
The effect also compounds, S&P 500 companies with female CEOs have boards that are 39% female, versus 33.7% company-wide, and women board chairs drive a 10.2-point improvement in leadership-team gender diversity during their tenure, compared to 6.7 points under male chairs. In other words, one seat tends to open the door to more.
Yet progress has stalled just short of where it needs to be. Women hold about 30% of Russell 3000 board seats and 28.3% globally--both essentially flat over the past year--and newly appointed women directors actually fell from 42% to 33% of new board seats between 2024 and 2025. Researchers point to roughly 30–33% as the "critical mass" threshold where women's presence starts to meaningfully shift board behavior, which means most companies are sitting right at the edge of relevance rather than past it.
Good Good Golf's all-male leadership team isn't an outlier so much as a preview of what stalled progress keeps producing.
A powerful El Niño is intensifying fast in the Pacific, with the World Meteorological Organization forecasting it will strengthen to very strong intensity by late 2026, with nearly 100% odds it persists through February 2027. Some models put a real chance it crosses the "Super El Niño" threshold this fal.
The fallout won't hit evenly. Roughly 172.3 million women and girls are already food insecure in the countries expected to be hit hardest, and in 20 of 22 high-risk countries, more women and girls are going hungry than men. Women and girls eat last and least in many households, have less access to land, credit, and markets, and face steeper barriers to recovering from shocks, with girls also facing higher risk of dropping out of school, early marriage, and gender-based violence when crops fail.
Children face a parallel crisis, more than 162 million children, over two-thirds of all children in Eastern and Southern Africa, live in areas exposed to this El Niño's impact, and in Somalia alone, El Niño flooding during the last comparable season displaced 1.2 million people and disrupted schooling for close to 900,000 children.
Aid groups are calling this a narrow but closing window for anticipatory funding before the peak hits this winter.
The Daisy Chain Fields review is in.
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Here are all the September astrological transits. Plus your horoscope. Bonus: here is the September numerology as well (it’s a listening experience)!
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