The Conversation - Women take over the UFC

In 2011, Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White famously said that female fighters would never compete. A decade later, two of the top three matches on the main card for Saturday evening’s pay-per-view event feature female fighters.

The UFC’s popular female mixed martial artists are outliers in a sports industry that pays and promotes male athletes at far higher rates than their female counterparts. But as media studies scholar Jennifer McClearen explains, the platform the UFC gives women shouldn’t distract from the fact that the promotion company ruthlessly exploits all of its fighters, male and female.

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