Europe’s win over the United States at Bernardus Golf a couple of weeks ago was, by any honest measure, one of the best weeks women’s golf has had in years. Full galleries, a match that swung on Sunday singles, a crowd that made Bernardus sound like a football ground rather than a golf course. It was the kind of week the sport’s administrators point to when they talk about momentum, and they are not wrong to. It was also a week in which not a single player on either team earned a cent of prize money for playing, because that is how the Solheim Cup works, exactly like the Ryder Cup on the men’s side. That is a fair and defensible arrangement in isolation. It becomes a slightly less comfortable one when you set it against the wider gap in what women’s golf actually pays across the rest of its season.
The number worth sitting with is this: the LPGA’s total purse for 2026 sits at roughly 132 million dollars across the whole season. The PGA Tour’s is somewhere around 500 million. That is not a gap that is closing at any meaningful pace, it is a gap of roughly three and a half times, and it exists despite a LPGA season that has produced arguably better theatre than the men’s tour has in the same stretch. Nobody who watched Bernardus, or the AIG Women’s Open, or Ruoning Yin’s run through the FM Championship field, would say the product is the problem. The product has not been the problem for a long time. The money simply has not caught up to it.
Where the comparison actually breaks down
It is easy, and slightly lazy, to wave this away with the line that men’s golf simply generates more television revenue, and therefore more prize money, and that the market is only reflecting demand. There is truth in that as a mechanism, but it treats the current gap as a natural, fixed state rather than the product of decades of unequal investment in coverage, scheduling, and promotion that shaped the audience in the first place. Television numbers do not fall from the sky. They are built, tournament by tournament, broadcast slot by broadcast slot, over years, and women’s golf has spent most of its history getting a much smaller share of that building effort than the men’s game. Judging the current purse gap as a pure reflection of current demand, while ignoring the decades of underinvestment that produced that demand, gets the causation backwards.
The more useful comparison is not LPGA versus PGA Tour in the abstract, but the rate of change on each side. Signature events on the PGA Tour now regularly carry purses of twenty million dollars, a number that would have sounded absurd a decade ago and now barely gets a raised eyebrow. The LPGA’s biggest individual events, by contrast, have grown too, but from a much smaller base and at a much slower rate, meaning the gap in absolute terms keeps widening even in years where both tours technically grow. A rising tide does not lift boats equally when one boat started so much lower in the water.
What actually moves the number
None of this is an argument for treating the Solheim Cup or the Ryder Cup differently from each other, since match-play team events not paying prize money is a fairly even-handed tradition that neither tour has broken, and there is a reasonable case that a biennial team event is exactly the kind of golf that should stay about pride rather than pay cheques. The argument is about everything around those two weeks. Sponsorship dollars, broadcast deals, and signature event purses are the actual levers that move the total, and all three still favour the men’s game by a wide margin, even as the women’s product closes the gap in quality and drama by any measure that matters on the course.
The frustrating part, watching a fortnight like the one women’s golf just had, is how obviously the argument for closing the money gap makes itself. A tight, well-attended Solheim Cup is not evidence that the current financial structure is fine because the product still drew a crowd despite it. It is evidence of how much upside is sitting there for whoever finally backs the tour at a level that matches what is actually happening on the course. The women’s game keeps delivering weeks like Bernardus. The rest of the sport’s economics have some catching up left to do before the money reflects it.