WWE Evolution 2 Marks a Bittersweet Moment for Women’s Wrestling

Women’s wrestling has been through many iterations—see the Attitude era and the Divas era. Sunday brings the next chapter, with Evolution 2, World Wrestling Entertainment’s second all-women wrestling event.

Evolution 2, coming seven years after the first installment in 2018, marks another important anniversary in the world of wrestling. Ten years ago, the women’s wrestling evolution ostensibly began, when Becky Lynch, Charlotte Flair, and Sasha Banks made their debuts on WWE’s flagship program Raw. A decade since they stepped in the ring and set off a new era in the industry, women’s wrestling has undertaken a bumpy journey, gaining momentum but at a spasmodic pace.

The making of Evolution

“We hear you. Keep watching,” the disgraced former WWE chairman Vince McMahon posted on X, formerly Twitter, in early 2015. McMahon was responding to the viral hashtag, #GiveDivasAChance, which took off when wrestling fans began begging for women wrestlers to get more airplay after a women’s tag team match on an episode of WWE’s flagship program, Raw, lasted only 30 seconds.

Until 2016, “Divas” is what WWE’s female wrestlers were called instead of, you know, just wrestlers, like their male counterparts. The moniker became a marketing tool to at once appeal to the growing audience of young girls and women, what with the sparkly pink butterfly championship the Divas got to wrestle for, and their hyper-sexualized appearance catered to the male demographic that has traditionally watched professional wrestling. Their matches were short, like the 30-second tag team match in 2015, and consisted mostly of hair pulling and open-handed slaps. (And don’t forget the bra and panties matches!)

It wasn’t always like this, however, with women like the controversial Fabulous Moolah and Mildred Burke, subject of the recent film Queen of the Ring, paving the way in the mid-20th century, while The Jumping Bomb Angles and Wendi Richter who, accompanied by Cyndi Lauper, helped launch the Rock ’n’ Wrestling connection, took up the mantel in the ’80s. The late Joanie “Chyna” Laurer, Trish Stratus, and Lita showed that women in wrestling could be sexy and tough in the late 1990s and early 2000s “Attitude Era,” before the introduction of the Divas championship in 2008 led to a near decade of a watered down style of wrestling.

All of that would change around the time of #GiveDivasAChance. A shift was brewing, beginning on the indie wrestling scene and making its way to NXT, WWE’s developmental system where wrestlers like Lynch, Flair, and Banks (currently known as Mercedes Moné) were putting on long, technical matches that fans and the wrestlers themselves were clamoring for. That was apparently what we were to keep watching for, as per the social media instructions of McMahon. There were some positive steps made: In 2016, the Divas branding was done away with and the accompanying championship was retired, replaced by a proper women’s title with a design on par with the men’s (there are now 10 women’s championships across WWE and its developmental brands). Women got the coveted main event slot of WWE’s biggest show, WrestleMania 35, in 2019, and women have now wrestled in pretty much all of WWE’s iconic stipulation matches, such as the Royal Rumble, Hell in a Cell and Money in the Bank ladder matches, and, finally, their own dedicated pay-per-view, Evolution, in 2018.

What Evolution 2 means for women’s wrestling

There are asterisks next to some of these achievements, though. A man won the first women’s Money in the Bank match, retrieving a briefcase containing a championship contract from above the ring and tossing it down to a female competitor (a rematch was scheduled two weeks later after the resulting rightful uproar). Evolution acted as counter-programming to WWE’s then-fledgling partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where female athletes were not permitted to compete at the time. They have since been allowed to wrestle there, most recently in June, amid calls for WWE to pull out due to unrest in the Middle East, a continuing argument from fans. (WWE went ahead with a show in KSA shortly after Jamal Khashoggi was allegedly assassinated at the Saudi consulate, and continues to operate in the Kingdom despite a charter flight of WWE workers being detained in 2019.)

It’s perhaps for this reason that WWE saw no demand for a subsequent Evolution, even though most pay-per-views, or premium live events, as the company calls them, are annual events—that is, until next week, when Evolution 2 comes to Atlanta, Georgia.

As with #GiveDivasAChance, fans online have been calling for a second installment pretty much since the first. Indicating just how much hasn’t changed in the interim, women’s wrestling segments are often the first to get cut, a spate of female performers have been let go from their contracts in regular layoffs, and despite the additional women’s championships, these titles aren’t regularly defended. 

Evolution 2 is sorely needed, even though it’s an apparent afterthought among a packed pay-per-view schedule consisting of six supercards in as many weeks. No matches were announced until less than a fortnight before the show, two of which are multi-women matches, including a battle royal. As of this writing, the women’s United States championship is not scheduled to be defended, even though the whole point of a women’s only pay-per-view is to feature more matches with in-depth storylines.

Evolution 2 also takes place the the same weekend WWE’s biggest competitor, All Elite Wrestling (AEW), holds one of its marquee shows, All In, streaming on Prime Video. One can’t help but wonder if Evolution 2 is being scapegoated as counter-programming once again, set up to fail by going head-to-head against All In on streaming and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour in the stadium across the road. The Venn diagram of marks (wrestling vernacular for fans) and the Beyhive may not be a perfect circle, but with an increasingly diverse fanbase that is souring to the conservative-leaning WWE and veering towards the more progressive AEW, the overlap is greater than you might think. With WWE moving to Netflix earlier this year and more eyes on women’s sport than ever before, Evolution 2 is perfectly positioned to snag another portion of that viewership pie. If only WWE would give it a chance.