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With the Ultimate Fighting Championship putting its oomph behind two straight main events featuring females—Mackenzie Dern-Xiaonan Yan and Alexa Grasso-Viviane Araujo—now is a good time to chart the fascinating history of the rise and decline of women’s weight classes.
One of these fights was at strawweight (115 pounds), the other at flyweight (125 pounds). These are by far the most talent-rich female weight classes, not only in the UFC but the world. The 125-pound weight class was only established in the UFC in December 2017. Despite the late start, it is already so strong that, in addition to the UFC’s own fighters, there are enough left for Bellator MMA to have its own thriving women’s flyweight division, headed by longtime UFC contender and two-time title challenger Liz Carmouche. Meanwhile, women’s bantamweight (135 pounds), which has seen the biggest stars in women’s MMA history, has become a wasteland. How did we get here? What might the future hold?
Women fought in openweight contests as late as the early 2000s. For instance, one of the more notable bouts saw a 145-pound Marloes Coenen take on Becky Levi—a hulking 215-pound judoka who trained alongside Dan Severn. Levi was a perfect 7-0 at the time but got caught in a flying armbar from the more skilled Dutchwoman in just over a minute—a victory that calls to mind Royce Gracie’s early triumphs.
Once athletic commissions got into the mix, weight classes formed. Initially, 145 pounds was the primary division. There wasn’t enough talent in those days for any one class, so it’s natural that the most interesting division would feature the biggest fighters who still possessed a degree of skill. Moreover, there were a bunch of finishes. Women’s MMA’s first two true stars were both featherweights: “Cyborg” and Gina Carano. They faced one another under the Strikeforce banner in 2009 in the first women’s main event for a major North American promotion. Despite their having faced the best talent available at the time, Carano had four finishes in seven contests and “Cyborg” had five stoppages among her seven victories.
However, 135 pounds soon became the premier division. Granted, this was a weight class to which many former featherweights could easily cut. Why do that instead of staying at 145 pounds, especially since talent was still lacking in those days? In my mind, there were two reasons. There was initially a desire to avoid fighting Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino, who was head and shoulders above every other female fighter and had ruthlessly beaten down her prey. Later, there was a desire to benefit from the intense star power of Ronda Rousey, a woman who represented a perfect storm of qualities in terms of popularity.
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Bantamweight was easily the biggest and most important division, from the time Rousey ushered women into the UFC in February 2013 until sometime around 2018. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have been surprised. Rousey’s last fight was in December 2016, and with the UFC introducing the flyweight class a year later, a lot of fighters who could easily make that weight decided to fight there. That includes Valentina Shevchenko: in my opinion, the greatest pound-for-pound female fighter ever. In terms of pure skill, the strawweight class was superior, too. Men’s lightweights are more skilled than heavyweights for the same reasons.
Let’s look at Amanda Nunes, easily the greatest bantamweight champion of all-time. She is 5-foot-8, which might not seem so tall at first glance. However, in looking at a percentile calculator for height, the average female in the United States stands 5-foot-3.8 with a standard deviation of 2.8 inches, meaning Nunes is taller than 93.3% of women. In her native Brazil, where the average height is 5-foot-2.5, she is taller than 97% of women. For the sake of reference, Nunes is equivalent to a 6-foot-2 man in terms of how she compares to those of her own gender; and she isn’t particularly tall for the weight class, either. Germaine de Randamie is 5-foot-9, Holly Holm and Ketlen Vieira are 5-foot-8, and Julianna Pena and Raquel Pennington are only a hair shorter at 5-foot-7. All of these women are muscular and well-built, too. Thus, in terms of size requirements, women’s bantamweight can be compared to either men’s light heavyweight or heavyweight. It’s also no surprise that a weight class requiring such exceptional size is far less talented and skilled than one in which a much larger portion of the population can compete. Also keep this in mind: Just like basketball and American football attract a lot of physically gifted larger men, sports like basketball, volleyball and tennis attract a lot of physically gifted larger women.
What about the future? Personally, I see the 115- and 125-pound women’s weight classes being the main divisions for a long time to come. New, talented fighters are constantly emerging in those two classes, whereas I can’t think of the last time a real blue-chip bantamweight or featherweight prospect came along. Some people think the 105-pound women’s weight class is the future and have even clamored for the UFC to add it. I disagree. Atomweight is actually going too far in the opposite direction. Not many athletic, muscular women are petite enough to comfortably make 105 pounds on a consistent basis. At that point, you’re probably selecting fighters who are mostly 5-foot or 5-foot-1, and outside of Asia, that is well below the mean height. Not surprisingly, the talent level at atomweight is actually far inferior to that of women’s strawweight. Consider that Ayaka Hamasaki, viewed by many to be the all-time greatest atomweight fighter, was brutalized and knocked out by a young Livinha Souza in less than two minutes. Souza was never known for her punching power and was actually smaller than Hamasaki for the fight, as she barely had to cut any weight. It could be argued that she has never been a Top 20 strawweight, even as she improved over the next few years. However, she decimated the greatest atomweight ever.
That is actually a relatively minor objection. Even assuming the talent level improves, female atomweights just aren’t interesting to watch for the same reason few people watch men’s boxing at 105 pounds. Their blows just don’t do enough damage. There are hardly any knockouts at women’s atomweight outside of huge skill disparities, ground-and-pound or exhaustion. Thus, the contests either take the form of pure point fighting, with little damage sustained by either side, or grappling. It’s just too boring for too much of the audience, and that’s always going to be true, even if women’s atomweight finds its own version of the legendary Ricardo “El Finito” Lopez.
I do believe there is hope for the heavier weight classes—at least at 135 pounds. As women’s MMA becomes more common, more tall, athletic women will pursue it as a career. We won’t see skilled women’s bantamweight prospects as often as we see them at 115 or 125 pounds, but they will eventually get there. Sadly, Nunes may be retired by the time these talents become serious contenders, but it won’t be a wasteland forever. The same cannot be said for featherweight and especially lightweight. There will be occasional superstars like “Cyborg” and Kayla Harrison at those weights, but the size requirements are too extreme for either division to thrive for the foreseeable future.