McMann: Reebok Deal unfairly impacts women fighters
Sara McMann: “I don’t think that [the UFC] is out to screw the women. If they were, they wouldn’t have even added them in to begin with.”
UFC women’s bantamweight contender Sara McMann appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour. and said the Reebok Deal unfairly impacts female fighters. it unevenly impacts female fighters. Fighers are compensated due to tenure, and bantamweight women have only been in the UFC for two years.
“I feel like this is a really touchy subject just because if you look at the numbers and you look at the facts, there could be a strong case for gender inequity in the way this deal is presented,” said McMann as transcribed by Marc Raimondi for MMAFighting.com. “I think the UFC and Reebok would never want to be perceived as somebody who was treating an entire gender poorly.”
“Gender equity is a very big deal. ‘m not gonna come and make statements if I don’t actually have backing, if I’m not in the right. I’m not gonna pitch a fit and throw a tantrum. I’m gonna come intelligently and say that really is not fair.”
“The women are just recently added, but that doesn’t mean that these girls haven’t been fighting for years or been in other sports for years and they don’t deserve to be compensated for that. They deserve $2500?
“This is really something they really need to think about, because it does look discriminatory against an entire gender. So I think they probably will do the right thing and contact people and make personal deals. They’ve already done that with other people and I don’t understand why they couldn’t do that with the women.”
“[Men] are getting the majority of that chunk and we’re being left high in dry because we were just recently added,. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had full careers and these women don’t deserve it. We’re not the same as just a younger guy who just made it to the UFC. We shouldn’t be treated that way.”
“I don’t think that it was purposely, because if you look at it on paper it looks fair. I don’t think that [the UFC] is out to screw the women. If they were, they wouldn’t have even added them in to begin with.”
“I wasn’t going to make a statement without looking and examining whether I could back it up,. That really is the case. It would be the equivalent if this were the civil rights movement and you decided to hire minorities and then you instill a policy that said the only way you can be applicable for a raise is if you have been with the company for five years. Well, automatically every single minority would be out of that running.”
The UFC counts Strikeforce fights towards tenure, which pushes the numbers up for some women. However, Strikeforce did not have a strawweight division, so with the exception of champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk and her challenger, the entire division is at the bottom tier of $2,500.
McMann is very adroitly playing a strong hand. She said she is going to get into contact with an attorney specializing in the field of gender discrimination in sports, which is another way of saying she has not gone to an attorney, yet. And she held out the example of the UFC contacting figures and offering compensation who were unduly effected by the change. She will likely get a call soon.
If someone wants to earn a lifetime blue name, it would be useful to see a breakdown of where every female fighter is in the tiers. First one to complete it and post it wins. It might also be useful to see what the effect of adding Invicta fights to the tiers would be.