The fastest-growing part of golf still gets sold the same old way

US National Golf Foundation data reported by Forbes shows female representation in on-course golf has climbed to 28% of the traditional golfer population — the highest share on record, up from 20% in 2012 — with women and girls accounting for 52% of all net participation growth in American golf between 2020 and 2025, a net gain of 2.5 million players. In Great Britain, women and girls make up around a fifth of adult golfers and roughly 1.46 million players, but England Golf's Girls Golf Rocks programme and similar initiatives mean one in three new golfers joining the game today is female. The LPGA's 2025 prize fund reached a record $131 million, up roughly 90% in four years — investment following participation, not the other way round.

None of that growth shows up in how a golf ball gets sold. Walk down the ball aisle and the split is still colour-coded: white boxes for the "standard" game, pink and purple boxes for the "women's" one. That split is not entirely fiction. It is, however, measuring the wrong thing.

What a "ladies' " golf ball actually changes

We've written before about what compression is — a measure of how much a golf ball deforms on impact, and how much force is needed to fully engage the core. Balls marketed to women typically use a lower-compression core, some rated under 50 on a scale where a tour ball often sits above 90, built on the genuine physical premise that a slower swing needs less resistance to compress the ball properly and transfer energy efficiently. Many also use dimple patterns tuned for a higher, more forgiving launch, and a handful — unusually — are built to a larger diameter than the standard 1.68 inches, raising the ball's centre of gravity to help it get airborne with less swing speed behind it.

That is a real, defensible engineering decision. A ball built for a 70–80 mph swing genuinely behaves differently, and often better, than a tour-compression ball at that speed. The problem was never the engineering. It's the label stapled to it.

The part that's real, and the part that's marketing

The industry has a name for the pattern, and it isn't a flattering one: "shrink it and pink it" — take the men's product, soften it, resize it, repaint it, and call the substitution complete. MyGolfSpy and researchers at Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative have both documented how often that stands in for genuinely understanding what a woman golfer's swing needs, and consumer-marketing expert Bridget Brennan has put the criticism plainly: "Pink is not a strategy unless you're raising money for breast cancer research."

To be precise about what that criticism does and doesn't mean: it is not a claim that the compression engineering is fake. It's a claim that the label is measuring the wrong variable. A golf ball has no way of knowing who is holding it. It only knows how fast the club was moving when it got there, and what spin and launch conditions that swing produced. Gender predicts none of that directly — swing speed does, and swing speed is not sorted neatly by gender.

The overlap nobody markets around

TrackMan tour data puts the average LPGA Tour club speed at 94 mph — faster than the 93.4 mph TrackMan/Snell Golf figure we've cited before for the average male amateur swing. The average female amateur, by the same data, swings at 78 mph. Read those three numbers together and the picture changes: the gap the "pink aisle" is built around is a gap between averages, not a gap between genders. A woman swinging at or above the LPGA average is not the golfer a soft, high-launch, low-compression ball was engineered for, regardless of what the box says. A man swinging well below the male amateur average very possibly is — regardless of what his box says instead. We made a version of this same argument about compression and handicap in The Compression Myth; the swing speed data behind it doesn't change when you replace "handicap" with "gender" as the label doing the sorting.

What this means for your own fitting

The fix is the one KaddieIQ has argued from the first article on this site: find your actual swing speed, then match the ball to that number, not to a marketing aisle. A launch monitor session at a golf retailer or a free smartphone app will give you a usable figure. If it comes back well above or well below what the ball currently in your bag was designed for — whichever aisle it came from — that gap is costing you distance, consistency, or both, on every single shot.

Questions worth answering

Are women's golf balls actually different from men's, or is it just the colour?

Both things are true at once. The colour is pure marketing — it has no effect on performance. But many balls marketed to women genuinely do use a lower-compression core and a higher-launch dimple pattern, built for a slower swing speed. The engineering is real; it's just labelled by gender instead of by the number that actually matters.

Should every woman play a low-compression "women's" ball?

Only if her swing speed suits one. Average female amateur swing speed sits around 78 mph, well inside the range those balls are built for — but "average" hides a wide spread, and plenty of women swing faster than that, including every player on the LPGA Tour, who average 94 mph.

Can a woman with a fast swing speed play a standard tour ball?

If her swing speed and spin profile suit it, yes — the ball has no gender requirement built in. The same is true in reverse: a man with a slow swing speed is frequently better fitted by a lower-compression ball than by whatever tour-level ball is on the shelf at eye level.

Does golf ball colour affect performance at all?

No. Colour is a visibility and preference choice, not a performance variable. Compression, cover material, dimple pattern and core construction are what change how a ball behaves — none of which is determined by whether the box is white or pink.

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