What If? – The Women’s Evolution Never Happened

TheChairshot.com asks the question…What If? Rob Bonnette discusses what if the Women’s Evolution never happened!

To fully understand how far things have come, you have to go back to 2012-2013, which was the worst it had been on the women’s side since the bra and panties match days of the Attitude Era.  They had a run where five out of six Diva’s champions outright left the business after dropping the title because they just didn’t want to be bothered anymore. Battle Royals were over the second rope for eliminations. TV matches, when they even happened, rarely lasted five minutes and PPV matches didn’t even get 10. Speaking of PPVs, they usually had one women’s match and never more than six women wrestling on the card. Fast forward to 2019 when things were at their peak, and there were two or three and sometimes four women’s matches on a PPV (2.5 exactly). Women’s matches main evented three different times, and just under a dozen (11.9 to be exact) women wrestled per PPV.  That is an astronomical jump over the four years that the Women’s Evolution had gone through at the time.

The Evolution didn’t just affect wrestling inside WWE. AEW for one may not have even bothered to create a division when it was formed in 2019. Women’s wrestling in ROH was on life support at the time, and the TNA Knockouts Division was not what it once was.  It existed on the indies, but before WWE began to take it seriously, there wasn’t much of a pipeline to anything significant there. So if WWE hadn’t made that step, we’d still likely be there today. With the main feeders of talent of AEW not doing much to promote women’s wrestling, there would have been little incentive for the boys club that put AEW together to even be interested, beyond some token representation here or there. But with their big goal being to provide an alternative to WWE, then they had to offer all the forms of wrestling that the Big Bad Fed was offering, which meant fielding a women’s division that did more than have one or two matches a month. WWE’s Women’s division being what it was in 2019 forced AEW’s hands, lest they wanted to be out-progressived by WWE of all people. TNA would ultimately step their game back up on that end and their revived Knockouts division would be a big reason they turned a corner over the past few years. ROH has bulked up it’s women’s content since being bought by Tony Khan, and even MLW has gone from featuring little women’s wrestling for years to the point of having a lot more lately.  And outside the US, New Japan has added two Women’s championships since 2022.

None of that happens if the baseline for women’s wrestling in WWE is not raised like it has been. Showing that women’s wrestling can go as far as to headline their biggest show of the year if done right has opened the door for everyone else to feature it more and give it higher spots on their respective cards. It’s not uncommon now in TNA and ROH for the women’s championship to main event a PPV, and AEW has had at least one show where the women’s title should have been the main event (Revolution 2025) and a few others that could have without anyone blinking. We’re at the point where on any given night one of the other companies may put on a show that outdoes WWE’s women’s wrestling offering that week or that month on a PPV/PLE. In 2026, AEW has had four women’s matches on both of it’s PPV’s (yes I count matches on the preshow, I do the same for TNA and for WWE when they have one). Athena has headlined several ROH PPVs since she’s been women’s champion. And WWE’s developmental arm in NXT routinely books more women’s matches and in higher spots on the card than anyone doing pro wrestling on television, whereas in their infancy, they were a one woman’s match per show operation as well. WWE’s rising tide has indeed lifted all boats.

So, imagine the domino effect in the opposite direction if that evolution never happens. TNA’s Knockouts division may never return to it’s previous glory. AEW and ROH may have never gone beyond token women’s representation on it’s shows. MLW may never bother with women’s wrestling, and New Japan leaves it up to Stardom to handle it instead of incorporating it into their own shows.