Content warning: This story contains graphic language and details about alleged sexual harassment and physical abuse that may be difficult to read and emotionally upsetting.
When mixed martial arts welcomes live crowds back to its arenas on Saturday, women will be at the forefront. Two of the top three fights at UFC 261 are women’s bouts. And it’s not a big deal, because it’s expected. It’s a common sight. Of course UFC champions Valentina Shevchenko and Weili Zhang deserve to be mentioned in the same breaths as their male counterparts. Of course Jessica Andrade and Rose Namajunas have earned the same spotlights as any former UFC titleholders. The No. 1-ranked pound-for-pound fighter in the sport is a woman. Two of the top three pound-for-pound fighters in the sport are women. One of the biggest superstars in MMA history was a woman. No one bats an eye at it.
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Yet that wasn’t always the case.
Ten years ago, what no one bats an eye at now would’ve been dismissed as a pipe dream by many. Think about that. Ten years — it’s not much time. Change may have come, but the charge to get there, the decades-long fight for acceptance, was a thankless and unsparing march largely unseen by mainstream eyes. And the march isn’t over — there’s still plenty of progress left to go. So to celebrate the women who will take center stage in a historic moment for the sport, we look back at the before-times, at the untold battles the women of MMA had to wage before the world began to accept them for who they truly are: Elite athletes, role models, and professional badasses through and through.
These are the stories from the frontlines of a revolution.
Editor’s Note: All interviews have been edited for clarity and concision.
In the beginning, there was nothing. HOOKnSHOOT, an Indiana-based organization helmed by Jeff Osborne, became one of the first hubs for women in North America, staging legitimate bouts and tournaments throughout the Midwest in the early 2000s, nearly a decade after UFC 1. A handful of Japanese promotions hosted opportunities for women in the European and Asian regions as well, but the scene was otherwise nonexistent. And for many athletes, finding a fight was only half of the struggle.
Julie Kedzie (retired fighter): It was hard to prove you could fight, because it was kind of like this weird language evolved over time with women in the sport. It started with, “women can’t fight.” Then it was, “well, some women can fight, but there’s not enough of them.” Then it was, “well, women don’t do the right weight classes.” And then it all of a sudden was like, “well, she’s not marketable enough because she’s not sexy,” or, “she’s too sexy to fight,” or, “why would you mess up your face?” It was always some kind of change in the conversation to make it not about the fights. Even though a man can be a good fighter or a bad fighter, he’s compared to a good fighter or a bad fighter. He’s not emblematic of an entire (gender). He doesn’t represent all men in the sport. But at that time, if you were a woman and you had a bad performance, somehow you shouldered the burden of representing all women not being able to fight. And that sucks. That’s a lot to put on somebody.
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Marloes Coenen (retired fighter): (Women fighting in MMA) didn’t exist. And then the internet didn’t exist. Nowadays you can school yourself on the internet, there are blueprints for fighters. If you’re 13 years old and you see, I don’t know, Cat Zingano or whoever fighting and you’re like, “wow, that’s so cool,” you can go onto YouTube and check their fights, and you can go to their Instagram and see how they interact with people. You can learn from that. But there was nothing. There were no real women I could look up to, there were no role models. So I didn’t have that, and people in the Netherlands had no clue what I was doing in Japan. And I could tell them about it, but then they thought, “oh, she’s full of shit.” It didn’t fit the box of what people thought of what a woman was.
Valentina Shevchenko (UFC champion): It was very difficult, because back then, the early 2000s, there were just not many girls who did MMA. Like two or three here, one or two there. And that’s it. It was completely different than what we have right now, and because there were so few women who I could fight, it was like your options were, “Oh, you sit around and you don’t fight, or you just go and do something different.”
Roxanne Modafferi (UFC fighter): Debi Purcell and Tara LaRosa were my other peers, Erin Toughill, but I really didn’t know anybody. And in America there were so few opportunities, I just had to take whatever. There were more opportunities for events in Japan, but I was large, because all the Japanese ladies were smaller, so it was harder to find me an actual match even though MMA was more popular in Japan. It was not a career. It was a hobby, basically.
Shannon Knapp (matchmaker and executive): For most of my career, on a matchmaking side, when people approached me about doing a female fight, they were never approaching me and saying, “Hey, go out there and find the best of the best.” Because that’s what they said to me when it was on the male side. When they came to me and they wanted me to scout for male talent, it was, “Find me the best of the best.” But when it came to the women and they would approach me about the female athletes, it wasn’t about that. It was: “Hot girls.” That’s what they were interested in. “They need to be able to fight, Shannon, but we need hot girls.”
So, if you could only imagine, there were many times I sat down in front of my computer and just searched “hot MMA girls.” That’s no lie. I would look through the different forums, I would look all through trying to find, you know, the package — let’s just call it the package — of what whoever I was working for at the time was looking for. I had to find the perfect athlete. This is what they wanted. They wanted someone that looked good. It was more about the looks.
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Sarah Kaufman (veteran fighter): The double standard of what they wanted to watch and what they didn’t want to watch, at the time especially, was very apparent.
It was (bizarre to be aware of), especially when you weren’t willing or you weren’t that person. Like, I’m not. I don’t wear dresses. I have nothing against people who want to wear dresses. I think everyone is their own person, but I’ve never wanted eyes looking at me for what my body looks like. And so, because I didn’t really cater to that, that also didn’t give me as many opportunities. So to be very acutely aware of what you were being brought in for and what you were being used for, regardless of skill set, and having that notion of, “Well, unless you’re the hot girl, you’re not going to get very many opportunities, and you probably won’t get paid that much, but you should just take whatever you can get, because you should be grateful that you’re getting any opportunity to fight” — it was a frustrating thing.
Cat Zingano (Bellator fighter): You had to play the game. You had to play the game and you had to say the right things, and you had to have the right answers to the questions. You had to be cute enough, but you couldn’t be, like, too smart or too funny or too whatever.
So it’d still be the same workload, still the same everything, but we’d get into those fights at these shows— and it almost always seemed like the girls fights were just, like, a novelty. It was, “oh, let’s just see these cute girls do these cute things.”
Germaine De Randamie (former UFC champion): Honestly, a women’s MMA fight in that time, a lot of people were like, “Let’s go have a beer and then come back for the next fight.”
I was the undefeated Muay Thai champion, 10 times in three different weight divisions. And they all told me, “You shouldn’t be doing this, just stick to kickboxing.” They all told me that.
Leslie Smith (Bellator fighter): There was no future in it, that was for sure. People didn’t really take it seriously. Because part of the thing about fighting in the cage is that it’s respectable no matter who does it, because you’re going in against a trained opponent. But if other people don’t respect your opponent — like most people didn’t respect women as an opponent — then they don’t really take it as seriously. There wasn’t that same seriousness with us, because people didn’t really think that chicks had knockout power, or that women were very skilled — or even could be very skilled — or had that bloodthirsty killer instinct.
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My very first fight, my opponent’s name was Danette Benjamino. So the announcer just started freestyling and announced us as “Delightful” Danette and “Luscious” Leslie Smith as we were walking to the cage. “Luscious” Leslie Smith. Luscious was the last word that applied. I thought that was kind of telling, just that someone would even feel comfortable doing anything like that. They didn’t care about my fighting abilities.
Kedzie: People did treat it like a sideshow. We had to be twice as good for half the respect.
Michelle Waterson (UFC fighter): I was a Hooters girl and I ended up actually becoming a ring girl for a local organization before I even knew what MMA was, and I ended up falling in love with it. I watched these athletes fight and I thought it was really, really intriguing that you could use all different forms of martial arts. And I remember talking to a promoter and telling him, like, “Hey, I have a background in martial arts. I would love to fight inside the cage.”
And he kind of just looked at me and laughed.
Kaufman: When I fought Miesha Tate, it was only three-minute rounds (rather than five minutes). And I remember taking a stand, getting on the mic and having to vocalize that, verbalize that, “Hey, why are we fighting three-minute rounds?”
Waterson: One of my first pro fights, they only let us fight two five-minute rounds (rather than three rounds). And that was really weird to me, because it’s not like we’re fighting somebody that’s outside of our weight class. It’s not like we’re fighting men. I’m fighting another woman that’s the same weight class as me. We should both be able to go the same amount of time as the men.
Carla Esparza (former UFC champion): Even if you fought like five times in one year, it wasn’t a livable income by any means. You were couch crashing or living in the gym or living at your parents’ to do this. It wasn’t something that you were making money at the time as a woman. Even on the biggest shows, you still weren’t. I got an opportunity to fight in Bellator for the first female tournament. When the guys were in a $100,000 tournament, I think ours totaled out to like $26,000 or something if you made it all the way, which obviously only one does. So even on the highest level where they had women, you still weren’t like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to make a lot of money.” I fought the No. 2 girl in the world for $1,500 (to win) and $1,500 (to show), you know?
Liz Carmouche (Bellator fighter): A lot of the male fighters, they were like, “Why are you guys here? Are you here for one of the guys? Are you his girlfriend? Are you just here to keep them company?” And I’m like, “No. I’m fighting on the same card as you. In fact, I’m the co-main event. You’re on the prelims. Look at the poster — your face isn’t on the poster. What is going on here?” And so it was constantly hearing and dealing with, “Oh, so what did you do to get here, huh?” Nothing. First of all I’m a lesbian, so I didn’t do anything to get here. I can guarantee you that. Secondly, I fought my way to get here. I have more skills than you do. So it was constantly just trying to prove yourselves, and be as articulate in interviews as you can, and making sure that in every moment that we carried ourselves as professional as possible, because anything less than that and we weren’t doing our due diligence for the rest of the community that was trying to come up.
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Lauren Murphy (UFC fighter): My ex-husband thought it was gross. He was like, “This is disgusting. You want to fight?” He was, like, repulsed by it — which is why he’s now my ex-husband. He was repulsed by the idea that women would fight each other. And he’s not the only one.
I can’t tell you how many conversations I had where I would tell somebody that I was going to do a fight, and they would look at me blankly, like, “What the f— are you talking about?” I had a guy that I worked with one time, I told him I was taking some time off to do a fight in another town, and it was really early in my career. And he was like, “Oh, girls fight? What do you guys do, pull each other’s hair and claw at each other?” He thought that was hysterical.
Coenen: I can remember a famous kickboxing trainer. I really looked up to him because he had trained one of my favorite fighters, and I met him in Japan. He had also trained kickboxers, female kickboxers that became champions, even a woman boxer. And he said to me, “Yeah, but women, they’re not designed to fight. They’re way too fragile. They’re way too kind.” And I was sitting there and I was looking like, “You know that I’ve been fighting for many years? You know that I’ve been a champion? And this is what you’re telling me to my face?!” I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t answer because this big hero of mine basically told me that I wasn’t fit to fight.
Jessica Andrade (former UFC champion): Everybody thought we were fragile. “Oh, she won’t be able to enter the octagon, she will cry when the first punch lands.” Every woman that chose MMA as a career heard a little bit of everything, that we wouldn’t succeed, that MMA wasn’t made for women. People telling us, “don’t go pull her hair, you have to fight her.” Or men saying, “Oh, you’re a fighter? So let’s fight to see who’s stronger.” It was idiotic.
Kaufman: All of the time (you’d hear), “Oh, you’re an idiot for doing this. I’ll never watch that. You’re wasting your time. There could be a better men’s fight that I’d rather watch on the card than watch your fight.” And then of course you would have the most common: “You should just be in the kitchen.”
Modafferi: People were always saying it, “Women shouldn’t fight. They should stay in the kitchen. Women are weak. They’re stupid. No one wants to see it. Oh, commercial break time.” All the time, everywhere. More people than not were like that.
Kedzie: It was hard because everybody in MMA was sort of an outcast for a while, right? It was kind of this nobody-else-lives-in-this-little-world club. And so when you are trying to make it in a group of people who are also being put down or just feeling like, “oh, this is my tribe,” or whatever that kind of weird mentality you have when you need to be into a community — and you’d see all these people who won’t respect you in that space, it’s really insulting. And it can really mess with your head, you know?
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Murphy: I didn’t even tell a lot of people that I fought. I was so, I guess, aware that might be their response that I didn’t make a big deal out of it, and part of that is because I felt like people didn’t really take it seriously. There was probably a part of me that also didn’t take it seriously (because of what people said), and just kind of feeling like — I guess wondering if I was good enough. Like, maybe they’re right. Maybe I do look silly. Maybe this is kind of stupid.
Kedzie: There was always the sexualization though. I mean, I remember getting pinched in the ass on the way to the cage. I remember being spit on once. The Midwest fight scene, it was hard. It was a hard thing.
It’s weird. I was afraid of the walk to the cage more than I ever was for any fight.
As the sport grew, so too did the opportunities for its female athletes, if slowly. In 2007, 14 years after UFC 1, Gina Carano and Kedzie made history by competing in the first women’s MMA fight to be broadcast live on North American television. Five years later, in 2012, Knapp launched Invicta FC, the landmark all-female promotion that built the foundations of most modern day women’s divisions. The seeds were finally being planted, but many of the same battles remained.
Knapp: Once I was at Strikeforce and they had just taken over everything from ProElite, and these female athletes were integrated into Strikeforce, I had the opportunity to see these women. The Marloes Coenens, the Cris Cyborgs. I got to watch them train, I got to see everything — and they really changed my mind. What I realized was that all this time that I had this bad taste in my mouth about women competing in the sport, it wasn’t just the pretty girl thing. It was that every time that I watched a bout, it was mismatched. I’m watching women that are competing two weight classes above where they should be, or I’m seeing them put matchups together where somebody has just this wealth of experience but this (other) athlete doesn’t.
But some of these stories that these women told me were horrifying. The things they were enduring in their gyms — like, this girl told me she came into the gym, they were like, “Oh, you want to be a fighter?” And they duct taped her to the cage and let the guys hit her. Just stuff like that. They duct taped this girl to the cage and let the guys hit her — that’s sick, right? There were a couple of them that had been put in positions where they were fearful in regards to someone wanting (unwelcome sexual favors). In other words, “if you’re going to be in the gym, this is how (you make it here), this is what I expect.” Grabbing them in the privates in training and doing things when they’re training, and just being treated badly. A lot of the coaches wouldn’t even work with them: “They’re not profitable to us.”
Kedzie: A lot of people came with that assumption that if you’re a female fighter, you’re in there, you’re there to get plowed by everybody. And I hate to use that kind of language, but it’s because that’s the truth. A lot of bad things happened to people in gyms, with women in particular. You just became a target for a lot of hate.
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Esparza: It’s just really hard to be the smallest one (in the gym) and the different one. To get past that hump as a female, it’s very hard, especially when you didn’t have that camaraderie of other girls. Especially if you’re not comfortable with your body — there is still that male-female dynamic, you know? Like, this man is touching me all over my body and I’m not used to it, because I’ve never done a sport like this.
Murphy: I had a male coach that just thought women, female fighters, just weren’t that good. Like, none of them are very good, you know? All the time, just a lot of offhanded comments. It was abuse. It’s crazy for a coach to talk like that to his athlete. It was kind of like having a parent — you just assume they’re right, you know? You’re like, well, he’s the coach. He’s a great coach. He must know what he’s talking about. And now looking back, I’m like, pshhh, that guy didn’t know what he was talking about. But at the time I just believed it, and for a while my confidence was really broken. He embodied an attitude that a lot of people had.
Zingano: I remember looking at me and Miesha Tate’s fight (in April 2013). It was my first Fight of the Night, I was the first mom out there, it was the first TKO (by a woman in UFC history). It was a badass fight. And I remember just wanting to go back, I got on YouTube and I looked at the comments because I wanted to read what everybody thought — and it was not at all what I thought. I thought people were going to be saying, “Damn! They had great striking! They had great takedowns! She got out of submissions! She did this, she did that! What an amazing fight!”
No. It was, like,“Would I f— her? Would I f— her?” Like, “Oh, she’s hot.” Or it was, “We don’t want to see these bitches in there,” and blah, blah, blah, “We want them in the kitchen.” And it was just like, where did you guys miss the technique? Where did you miss how hard we fought and what we did? There was blood, there were knees, elbows. Like…what? And it just was so objectified so differently. And I was so shocked. And it’s hard for it to not take away from it a little bit, you know?
Murphy: A lot of times I feel like you just can’t win as a woman. You just have to get used to the idea that people are going to hate you. They’re going to hate you if you talk shit. They’re going to hate you if you’re too polite. They’re going to hate you if you post naked pictures. They’re not going to follow you if you don’t. And especially as a female fighter, it’s like we’re expected to be very ladylike, we’re expected to be attractive, we’re expected to be well-spoken. We’re expected to be dainty and feminine, and also be really good at fighting, which sometimes is an impossible standard to meet.
Waterson: That’s why I would say a really exciting time for women’s MMA is when Shannon Knapp decided to step up and start an all-women’s organization — and we freakin’ killed it. Every time the card was stacked and the girls showed up and they put on a show. Every single time. And she proved that you can have an all-female show and stack the card from top to bottom and have entertaining fights that people will pay and tune in to watch. Her whole thing behind it was: “The world needs to see how good you guys are.” It’s kind of like that thing, you know, “if you build it, they will come.”
Kaufman: Honestly, Shannon starting Invicta allowed for the growth of what’s happening now, because she pulled all of these females together and proved, “Look at these divisions. These people as athletes and humans are so good, regardless of male or female, but the skill set is there.” So a lot of the explosion of the females has to be brought down to Shannon making that decision to start Invicta — which was something that at the time I was like, “That’s cool, but I don’t think it’s going to work.” But really it led to where we are now.
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Knapp: God, there were millions of people that laughed at me: “What?! You’re doing what?!”
I like to call them the weekend gardeners, these other promotions that have a female fight here or there. They’re rookie gardeners and just throwing something around. But what it really needed was someone to develop their skills, to really tend to it, tend the garden, really organize it, start replenishing it, replenishing everything, and really working to nurture something. Building these divisions out so there was some organization to it. And nobody wanted to follow through. That’s all it needed. It just needed somebody to care.
Coenen: I always say, we’re human beings. We’ve got two arms, two legs, a beating heart and a set of lungs, and that’s your core. And over that core there are all these layers of identity. And with a man the layers are built up different than for the women. As a woman, the sheep in us is fed, it needs to come out. But the lion is suppressed. And with a man, it’s the other way around. And the martial arts freed me of that.
But on the other hand, this is our society. It’s not only an MMA thing. And I think that the women in MMA are really pushing boundaries, because they’re openly aggressive — and proud of it.
After a fight that stretched more than two decades, the doors to gender equality in MMA finally began to inch open in 2013 following the debut of Ronda Rousey against Carmouche in the UFC. Rousey’s success proved to generations of disbelievers that women could become global icons and superstars. The revolution is far from over, but as women now lead the vanguard into the next era, combat sports will never be the same.
Modafferi: Man, it blows my mind so much. I remember I was at some restaurant watching the UFC, and the whole restaurant was watching. It was when Holly Holm fought Ronda Rousey, and Holly ended up winning by head kick. The whole entire restaurant was screaming for that. For them. Like, I’m getting chills. I remember the time when no one cared and we had to “be in the kitchen” and all of that. So just to be there, that was a big, historic moment for me.
Smith: I think it was the Weili (Zhang) vs. Joanna (Jedrzejczyk) fight (in March 2020) that finally solidified it. Because that was the No. 1 fight that people were like, “Hell yeah, that was an amazing fight.” Like, “Do you see this fight?!” Everything was blowing up during the fight. And there were no comments of like, “Oh yeah, look at that ass. Oh yeah, look at those boobs. Oh yeah, girl on girl action.” There was just too much good technique and too much appreciation for the good technique for all of the background sexism to be heard.
Kedzie: It’s an especially powerful place to be. It’s like “Ode to Joy” when you hear the trumpets come in — like, that was the Weili Zhang vs. Joanna Jedrzejczyk fight. It’s all a symphony, our way through the sport.
Kaufman: Now if there isn’t at least one or more female fights on the card, people are like, “Well, where are the women?!” Which is a really cool place to be.
But it’s become so much more accepted to be strong and to be promoted as being strong and to carry yourself with the self-esteem and the confidence. To be able to promote strength and muscle and power, as opposed to being like, “oh, you’re so little and so cute,” it’s such a strong and empowering position to be in. Like this morning I slept over at my niece’s house, and in the morning I was like, “Show me your muscles! I want to see your muscles!” That it’s now something that’s celebrated is pretty incredible for the next generation to come, that these are the people they can now look up to.
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Esparza: To me that is so rewarding, because I just never thought that we could be where we’re at. Some of the coolest moments for me, too, are showing up to different schools, or even my own school, and sometimes having girls outnumber guys in the classroom. To me it was like, every single time you showed up to a class back in the day, you were the only one. Or you were lucky if there was maybe one other — and usually they wouldn’t stick around long. So to have it today where it’s just normalized to be a bunch of girls in class, or sometimes even more than the guys, to me that just warms my heart.
De Randamie: I think we only dreamed of it. Now it’s like it’s almost 50-50 (women and men) in the gyms if you look at it.
Smith: While it frequently seems like MMA exists inside of a vacuum, it actually doesn’t — it’s part of the rest of the world. And there is a lot more progress that needs to happen in the rest of the world. I feel like MMA is helping that internationally, because it is creating these images of strong celebrated women that, I mean, you can’t dilute it. No matter how much sex appeal a promoter tries to add to their fighters, there’s still ultimately no diluting the fact that the world is enjoying and celebrating strong women. And I feel like that is changing things. I think it’s a wonderful thing that it’s becoming an image for people to see all around the world.
Waterson: I always tell people if you have an issue with a strong woman, it’s because you have some confidence issues within yourself. And that’s just what it is. If you have issues with a female being strong-minded and physically strong and able to step inside the octagon and do what she does, then maybe you don’t necessarily have the best confidence yourself. Maybe get that checked.
Smith: “Strong woman” frequently means a woman who has had to deal with a whole bunch of shit. So hopefully we can change that, and it won’t have to be that mainly — a woman who can deal with society and men’s bullshit — but it’ll mean a woman who can do whatever she wants.
Knapp: Isn’t this a funny one, too — all these management companies you see out there, just recently within the last year, you’ve seen that they’ve all taken a big grab for every woman that they can find, right? They’re out there, they’re signing these athletes as fast as they can right now. And they use the female athletes to barter for their male athletes to get them into these promotions. “You get me this girl and this, and I’ll sign x, x, x, and x of your male fighters.” They’re using the women to kind of barter now, but they’re still not paying the women what they should be paying them.
Coenen: I think it’s very important that the men stand up for women.
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If you’re comfortable with who you are and you’re proud of who you are, then you’re not afraid of other people gaining strength. You’re not afraid that they will surpass you and you won’t want to keep them down. There is a counter-reaction from the people who are afraid they will lose power. We have globalization, we have the internet, so things are moving really fast and people cannot keep up with the pace. They want to have everything as it was. But they’re fighting a losing battle, the people who are trying to suppress. And we women who are fighting in MMA are kind of at the forefront of it as well.
Shevchenko: A woman can be independent. She can be powerful. She can be strong.
And I think that this progress, it never can stop. There are so many things that could still be done, and I totally, totally see it coming, because every day, (that progress) is moving more and more toward the future. Toward more possibilities for women. Toward more interest for female martial arts. There’s still so much more to do. These platforms we have as MMA fighters, and their huge, huge coverage through the world — every single female fight is showing us that women are at a different level. It’s not just like we’re going and throwing wild punches. No. It’s much, much more. And that’s the beauty of the martial arts.
(Top illustration: John Bradford/The Athletic; Getty; Jeff Bottari, Josh Hedges, Rey Del Rio)