18 of the 26 LPGA bags we track carry a hybrid, against 5 of the 42 on the PGA Tour

When the LPGA Tour tees off at Sheshan for the Buick LPGA Shanghai on 15 October, the first of four autumn stops in Asia before the season goes home to Florida, watch the second shots into the long par 4s. The club coming out of the bag is far more likely to be a hybrid than it would be at a men's event, and on the evidence of the bags we keep, the gap is not a few percentage points. It is most of the field.

We maintain 88 live tour bags, each re-verified against named sources and date-stamped on its own page: 42 on the PGA Tour, 26 on the LPGA Tour, 12 in LIV, plus four content creators and four elite amateurs. We counted, bag by bag, how many carry at least one hybrid, how many heads each carries, and at what loft.

The number

18 of the 26 LPGA Tour bags we track carry at least one hybrid. On the PGA Tour the figure is 5 of 42, and in LIV it is 2 of 12. That is roughly seven in ten women's bags against about one in eight men's.

The caveat, where you can see it: this is the set of bags we maintain and re-verify, not a census of either tour. Twenty-six LPGA bags is a small base, so one player changing her setup moves the women's figure by about four percentage points, and bags change week to week. Every count below is per bag, not per club, because a player carrying three hybrids is still one player.

What counts as a hybrid, and what we left out

A row counts if it is listed and sold as a hybrid or a rescue. That includes Shiho Kuwaki's two Bridgestone BX2HT heads, which her bag sheet files as 3- and 4-utility but Bridgestone sells as a hybrid. It does not include driving irons or utility irons such as Scottie Scheffler's Srixon 4-iron, and it does not include Cameron Young's 21-degree Titleist GTS3, which sits in a shared fairway-and-utility row and is reported elsewhere as a 7-wood.

The one genuine judgement call is the Callaway Apex UW. Callaway calls it a utility wood: a compact, wood-shaped head built to sit between a fairway wood and a driving iron. We kept it out of the headline count. Put it back in and the split becomes 21 of 26 LPGA bags against 10 of 42 PGA bags, because five men carry one in the slot: Xander Schauffele, Min Woo Lee, Akshay Bhatia, Jason Day and Sam Burns. The ratio narrows and the gap survives comfortably. However you define the club, the women's tour is built around it and the men's is not.

Not one hybrid, but two or three

The bag count understates the difference, because the women who carry a hybrid rarely stop at one. Those 18 LPGA bags hold 30 hybrids between them. Eight players carry one, eight carry two, and two carry three: Leona Maguire at 22, 26 and 30 degrees, and Céline Boutier at 19, 22 and 25, across three different PXG generations. Every one of the five men who carries a hybrid carries exactly one.

The lofts tell the same story from a different side. The five men's hybrids sit between 19 and 24 degrees, which is the classic long-iron replacement and nothing more: Jordan Spieth's 21-degree Titleist TSi2, Robert MacIntyre's 19-degree Stealth 2 Rescue, Sungjae Im's 19-degree Titleist 818 H2, Aaron Rai's 24-degree GT2, and a Ping G440 at around 19 or 20 in Viktor Hovland's bag. The women's 30 heads run from 17 degrees to 30. The most common single loft is 22, which appears nine times. At the strong end, Charley Hull and Haeran Ryu both carry a 17-degree head, stronger than any hybrid on the PGA Tour side of the file. At the weak end, Maguire's 30-degree head sits where most players would carry a 6-iron. On the women's tour the hybrid is not one club. It is a whole stretch of the bag.

The models: Ping, then TaylorMade

Ping is the brand that owns this slot on the LPGA side. A Ping hybrid is in 8 of the 18 women's bags that carry one: the current Ping G440 hybrid for Maguire, Allisen Corpuz and Linn Grant, the previous-generation G430 for Lydia Ko, Maja Stark and Jennifer Kupcho, and the older G425 for Nelly Korda, Lauren Coughlin and Maguire's two weaker lofts. The G440 is a maraging-steel face on a low centre of gravity with an adjustable hosel, which is the whole job description: get the ball up, and let the loft be tuned into a gap.

TaylorMade is next. The Qi4D Rescue is in three LPGA bags, Hull's pair at 17 and 19, Ryu's 17 and Esther Henseleit's 22.

The other thing worth noticing is age. Hybrids are the clubs players are slowest to replace. Megan Khang's GAPR heads date from 2018, Lottie Woad's TSR2 from 2022, and three women still carry Ping's G425 from 2021, two generations behind the G440. Sungjae Im's 818 H2 on the men's side is a 2017 head.

What the men carry instead

So if 37 of the 42 PGA Tour bags carry no hybrid, what fills the gap? Mostly an iron. Of those 37 bags, 20 carry a driving iron, a utility iron or a separately listed long iron above the set: Scheffler's Srixon 4-iron, Shane Lowry's Srixon ZXiU, Brooks Koepka's Nike 3-iron, Collin Morikawa's TaylorMade P-DHY. Sixteen carry a 7-wood, a 9-wood or a fairway wood lofted at 20 degrees or more, and six of those carry both. Five more use the Apex UW. Four, including Tiger Woods and Rickie Fowler, go from a 3-wood or 5-wood straight into the irons with none of the three. The 7-wood side of that story has its own piece, the 7-wood takeover, and we are not going to rerun its numbers here.

The eight LPGA bags without a hybrid are not iron bags in disguise either. Three of them carry the Apex UW, and the other five, Minjee Lee, Carlota Ciganda, Ruoning Yin, Julia López Ramírez and Hannah Green, cover the slot with a utility iron, a lofted wood or both. Every LPGA bag in the file carries at least one of a hybrid, a utility wood, a lofted fairway wood or a long or utility iron.

Why the split runs along the tour line

The short answer is speed. Trackman's published tour averages put LPGA driver speed well below the PGA Tour's, and speed is what turns loft into height. A long iron or a utility iron launches low by design. A player swinging fast enough can still get it high enough to stop on a green, and on firm ground a lower, flatter flight is an advantage. A player swinging slower cannot get the same club high enough, and the shot runs through the back. A hybrid fixes that with a low, deep centre of gravity and a wider sole. Shaft length is the other half of the trade: a hybrid is shorter than the fairway wood at the same loft, so it is easier to strike from rough and from a poor lie.

LIV is the useful control here. Its 12 bags are men at tour speed, playing different events on different courses, and they come out at 2 of 12, the same shape as the PGA Tour. Whatever is driving the split, it follows the player's speed rather than the tour's golf courses.

What to take into your own bag

Most club golfers swing far closer to LPGA speed than to PGA Tour speed, and buy their long game as if they were Scheffler. If the longest iron in your bag is a 4 or a 5 you cannot get airborne off a tight lie, the women's tour is the template to copy, not the men's. A single 22-degree hybrid is the most common club in the LPGA file for a reason, and the Ping G440 hybrid at around $300 is the version that is in the most of those bags. A second, weaker head in place of your 5-iron is a perfectly professional decision, and two of the best players in the women's game carry three. If the shortlist is the Ping against TaylorMade's compact Qi4D Rescue, the head-to-head covers that choice.

Skip the hybrid if you hook it. The same low, rearward mass that launches it easily also turns it over readily, and plenty of golfers find a utility wood or a 7-wood easier to hit straight. Skip it too if you are genuinely fast and play firm, windy golf, where a utility iron's lower flight is the point and the Srixon ZXiU is the club the men's tour reaches for, though our page describes the outgoing model: a second-generation ZXiU reaches shops on 16 October under the same name. Whichever way you go, check the yardage gaps before you buy rather than after, which is what our club distance calculator is for.