Eleanor Cannon, the chairperson of Scottish Golf, has revealed that the amateur game’s governing body could follow the Royal & Ancient’s lead and stop taking national and international events to single sex clubs.

After Muirfield’s vote on allowing female members failed to gain the required two-thirds majority last week, the R&A swiftly acted amid widespread condemnation and removed the world renowned East Lothian club from the Open Championship’s rota for the time being.

Major amateur events like the Scottish Amateur Championship, the Scottish Strokeplay Championship and the Home Internationals are occasionally staged at male-only clubs while the Scottish Women’s Open Strokeplay is co-hosted between Troon Ladies and Royal Troon, two clubs which co-exist but retain separate male and female memberships.

Cannon said: “We’re meeting on Monday and that’s one of the things on the agenda because we’ve got to decide what our response is.

“I’m delighted that Martin Slumbers (the R&A chief executive) took the stance that he did. I think it’s what the game needs.”

Cannon is now urging the Muirfield membership to make “a courageous set of decisions” over the next few months after a vote which shed the game of golf as a whole in an extremely bad light.

“What (Muirfield) has become in the space of a week is simply another all-male club,” she said. “They are not elite anymore and they have got to look at the consequences of that and decide what they are going to do about it. The responsibility sits with the Muirfield board for that and I would very much like to see them take a courageous set of decisions over the next few months.

“We have to put it into context. This is one of 608 clubs and the fantastic work that’s going on at ground level by people who love the game and want to grow the game simply cannot be diminished by the recent press about Muirfield.”

Meanwhile, Paul O’Hara overcame Graham Fox in a play-off to win the Tartan Tour’s P&H Championship, the opening order of merit event of the season, at The Renaissance.

Fox, who will compete in the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth after a late journey south, closed with a three-under 68 to join his Clydeway Golf Centre colleague O’Hara at the top on a three-under 210 but it was O’Hara who claimed the £5,600 first prize in the sudden-death shoot-out.