LPGA sponsors pushing more prize money, better services for women’s golf

The fourth of the LPGA’s five majors this season will hold this weekend in the Evian region of France, where golfers will compete for a chunk of the Amundi Evian Championship’s $6.5 million purse and its seven-figure winner’s cut.

The European tournament’s prize pool is $2 million more than last year, marking a turn in the second half of a season as sponsors double down on their efforts to propel the league forward, reports sportico.com.

In 2021, the combined purse across all five LPGA majors was $23.3 million. This year’s total will top $37 million.

In its inaugural year as an LPGA tournament sponsor, Chevron upped the purse for its championship from $3.1 to $5 million. Healthcare provider ProMedica, another 2022 newcomer and the first-ever presenting partner of the U.S. Women’s Open, increased the tournament’s purse to $10 million—the largest in LPGA history and nearly double 2021’s total payout—with the winner earning $1.8 million. There was also a commitment to push that purse to $12 million over the next five years, putting it almost at par with the men’s majors.

(This year’s U.S. Open had the largest purse among the four men’s majors at $17.5 million. The Masters and PGA Championship were $15 million apiece, and the Open Championship followed at $14 million.)

The pattern held across the remaining majors. KPMG doubled the purse for last month’s Women’s PGA Championship to $9 million; this weekend’s Amundi Evian Championship made its own $2 million bump; and the AIG Women’s Open, which increased its purse by $1.3 million to $5.8 million in 2021, added another million to the 2022 pot. That’s more than double the size of the event’s purse before AIG took over as title sponsor in 2019.

The women’s majors are finally seeing