Disparity exists primarily because mens' cycling generates more income/revenue than womens cycling does.

One of the possible negative impacts of something like this (if UCI approved a change) is that there are most likely many UCI womens' events which won't be able to make an inflated minimum prize list and will no longer be UCI events, meaning fewer opportunities for womens' racing.

This is the case of the NRC calendar in the US for 2008. The NRC increased the prize list minimum and many previous NRC events couldn't generate enough funding to meet those minimums, so the events are no longer NRC events.