Surely you can understand why? The industry is already dominated by white men. They (we, in fact) don't need extra support to enter and get accepted by the industry. We don't suffer lots of subtle forms of harassment and discrimination, simply for being different from the norm.

I don't think money by itself is the solution, but in order to make the industry more accepting of women, it helps if people get used to women in the industry, which means there need to be more women in the industry, which means some additional encouragement is probably necessary. Addressing the sexism in the industry in the absense of women doesn't seem to work very well. We need more women in order to become more accessible to women.

That said, I do think it's odd to do this through larger prizes for women in a contest. Encouragement programs and networking events seem like a better way to do this. Then again, in sports, it's generally male competitions who tend to have far more prize money.