The Open Championship might drop its ban on women players to theoretically allow the likes of Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie to take part.

Peter Dawson, chief executive of the Royal and Ancient Club, which organizes the 145-year-old championship, says he is in favor of amending its rules in line with the majors on the PGA Tour so that women could enter.

The current rules state the tournament, being played this year at St. Andrews, is open to “any male professional or from a male amateur golfer whose playing handicap does not exceed scratch.”

But Dawson issued a brief statement Wednesday saying a rule change to take out the word “male” was “under consideration by the Royal and Ancient Championship Committee.”

Dawson was recently quoted as saying the rule was in place because it was thought that women, who have their own tours and majors, wouldn’t want to enter the men’s Open.

“If (the ban) really offends people, then we would take it out,” he told The Guardian newspaper in an interview. “In this instance the wording isn’t serving any purpose, so I would support taking it out.

“Not that I want to see the Open as a dual-sex event because golf at the elite level is not being played like that. That wording was put in place at a time when it was never thought that women would want to enter. The R&A is not in the business of keeping women out of the Open.”

The move has still to be approved by the Open’s Championship Committee. And even if it goes through, players such as Sorenstam and Wie would still be a long way from competing alongside the likes of Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh and Ernie Els.

Because the women do not have a world ranking, they would either have to come through a qualifying tournament or gain one of the exemptions available at events like the Scottish Open on the European Tour or the Western Open on the PGA Tour, to which they could be invited to play.

In 2003, Sorenstam became the first woman since 1945 to appear on the PGA Tour, finishing 96th out of 114 and missing the halfway cut by four strokes at the Bank of America Colonial.

It set the ball rolling. PGA Professional Suzy Whaley was 148th out of 156 after qualifying for the Greater Hartford Open; Davies missed the cut in the Korean Open; Australian Jan Stephenson finished joint last in a Champions Tour event; and then South Korean Se Ri Pak came a highly-creditable 10th in a tournament in her home country.

By then, Wie had played several times on the PGA Tour’s second-division Nationwide Tour and the Canadian Tour, and at the start of last year she hit the headlines by missing the cut by just one shot at the Sony Open in Hawaii at the age of 14.

Wie did not do so well on her return to the event this January, but her progress inevitably posed questioned to the organizers of the majors.

The U.S. Golf Association has already taken “male only” restriction out of the entry form for the U.S. Open, and Augusta National’s chairman said the Masters would welcome any woman who qualified.

Dawson was asked last year what would happen if Wie or someone else earned an exemption for the Open, and replied then that if it happened it was hard to argue a case for them being banned.