Where Is the Outrage?WWE’s Women-Free Cards, AEW’s One-Match Ceiling, and the Lopsided Conversation

When WWE ran back-to-back main roster shows this fall without a single women's match, wrestling Twitter/X muttered. A few columns shook their heads. Then the discourse moved on.

Meanwhile, All Elite Wrestling (AEW) continues to take a public beating for a familiar pattern: one women's match on Dynamite, often short, often parked in the same segment every week. Fans, pundits, and even some wrestlers call AEW's women's division "an afterthought" and scrutinize every pay-per-view card for how many women are cut.

So here's the uncomfortable question:

Where is the sustained outrage when WWE a company that markets itself as the home of the "Women's Evolution" puts on entire shows without women wrestling at all, while AEW gets dragged for at least putting one match on the board?

This isn't a defense of AEW's minimal booking. It's a critique of an uneven conversation within wrestling media and in feminist circles that lets WWE cash in on its reputation even as it quietly cuts women from the card.

The AEW Standard: One Match, Infinite Criticism

From almost the moment Dynamite debuted, viewers noticed a pattern: one woman's match per show. Early on, AEW officials blamed a shallow roster, injuries, or the growing pains of a new promotion. Six years later, that excuse creaks under the weight of a stacked locker room, a deeper indie scene, and a thriving global women's wrestling ecosystem.

Media and fans haven't let it slide, and they shouldn't.

• Articles tracing the "history of revolutions" in AEW's women's division point out that the promotion drifted into a default of a single women's match per show, often with limited storyline investment.

• Data-driven pieces show that in both 2023 and 2024, women's matches on Dynamite averaged just about 8 minutes, and there was almost always only two additional seconds of average match time.

• AEW pay-per-views and super-shows face harsh scrutiny. All In at Wembley Stadium in 2023 became a flashpoint when the historic card only featured a single women's match, a four-way for the AEW Women's World Championship. Tony Khan had to answer questions in the post-show scrum about why there weren't more women on the card, and outlets from fan podcasts to established sites framed it as a structural failure, not a one-off oversight.

  
  

Social media amplifies the criticism. Every Wednesday, fans live-tweet the running order: "Here comes the obligatory women's match in the 9:20 death slot". Think pieces, YouTube essays, and podcasts revisit the issue weekly. AEW's women's division has become, rightly, a litmus test for how seriously the company takes the "best wrestle here" tagline.

In other words, we treat AEW's women's booking as a live political question, not just a programming detail.

We should. But we should also apply the same standard somewhere else.

The WWE Reality: Full Shows With No Women Wrestling

Now slide your gaze over to WWE in late 2025.

On Novembe21's episode of SmackDown, recap pieces and reviews openly noted something glaring: the show featured no women's matches. The women's champion appeared in a brief cameo; a planned women's segment reportedly got bumped. Writers described the lack of women's wrestling as a "huge disappointment" that reinforced the perception that the SmackDown women's division "as a whole" remains poorly booked.

Fans on X did the math out loud:

• "SmackDown was a 2-hour show with no women's match."

• "Raw was a 2.5-hour show with no women's match."

• "No women's match for the second show in a row."

That's not just "one match, badly placed." That's zero women's matches, on consecutive main roster shows in a company that loves to remind you it once branded an entire pay-per-view "Evolution."

And it's not isolated:

• Heading into a revamped Saturday Night's Main Event in May 2025, coverage noted that the card had only four announced matches, none of which featured women. Wrestling media outlets described the situation as "no women's matches" on the show, and fans used Q&A columns to ask bluntly what it meant that women were missing from a marquee card.

• Cageside Seats later highlighted that WWE quietly added a women's United States Championship match, Zelina Vega vs. Chelsea Green, to SNM only after a SmackDown episode E, almost as a corrective gesture to the initial all-men lineup.

You don't have to dig deep into the archives to find other examples. Saudi-based shows like the Greatest Royal Rumble famously barred women from competing in 2018 due to local laws; WWE took criticism at the time, but often in the more comfortable register of "cultural compromise" rather than structural sexism.

More recent coverage of Evolution 2, WWE's second all-women's pay-per-view in 2025, also frames women's wrestling as both a triumph and an afterthought. A Time magazine piece points out that women still see their segments cut first, their titles left off cards, and their showcase show scheduled as counter-programming opposite AEW's All In and even a Beyoncé stadium concert.

So we're not dealing with a company that always treats its women's division as a crown jewel. We're dealing with a company that alternates between celebration and erasure and still largely escapes the kind of weekly, structural critique AEW gets.

The Double Standard: Why AEW Gets the Fire, and WWE Gets a Pass

If fans can count one women's match on Dynamite every week, they also can count zero women's matches on consecutive episodes of Raw and SmackDown. Yet the outrage culture moves differently.

Why?

1. Branding and the Myth of the "Good Comp.any."

WWE spent a decade selling the "Women's Evolution":

• The #GiveDivasAChance hashtag embarrassed the company into offering longer, more meaningful women's matches.

• Women headlined WrestleMania, worked Hell in a Cell, Royal Rumble, and Money in the Bank matches.

• Evolution (2018) and Evolution 2 (2025) became marketing proof that WWE "takes women seriously."

That narrative sticks. When WWE runs a show with no women's matches, many fans and pundits treat it as a weird off night rather than a symptom. The company built goodwill, so people give it the benefit of the doubt—even when the pattern says they shouldn't.

AEW, by contrast, sold itself from day one as a more progressive, fan-friendly alternative. So when it stumbles, people treat that stumble as a betrayal of its founding myth. You don't just criticize AEW's booking; you question whether the cool indie-adjacent promotion is actually any better than the "evil empire."

2. The Power of First Impressions

WWE's most egregious behavior toward women happened in the open during the Divas era: bra-and-panties matches, "pillow fights," women as eye candy. That sexism was so cartoonishly blatant that any improvement reads as progress by comparison.

AEW never had that particular baggage. But that also means every short match, every missing storyline, every one-match card feels like a fresh slight, not a less-bad version of the past. The perception that AEW was born in 2019 makes the current failings feel newer—and more fixable—than WWE's deeply entrenched habits.

3. Wrestling Media's Access Problem

There's also an access issue. WWE controls a massive media ecosystem:

• Company-produced documentaries and podcasts.

• Carefully curated interviews with stars.

• Partnerships with mainstream outlets that want to stay on WWE's good side.

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If you cover wrestling for a living, you navigate that terrain carefully. You can critique WWE's booking, but there's a point where sustained, structural criticism might threaten access. It's easier—and safer—to frame women-free cards as occasional missteps and focus hyper-critical energy on AEW, whose media operation is smaller and more fragmented.

Independent columnists and Substack writers do call WWE out, but their reach rarely matches the company's own PR machine. AEW, with its more open media scrums and online-savvy fanbase, generates more "discourse" per minute of TV—even when WWE commits the clearer sin of not using women at all on a given night.

4. Feminist Media's Wrestling Blind Spot

Now zoom out beyond wrestling media.

Mainstream feminist outlets happily cover the spectacle of women headlining WrestleMania or the cultural history of women's wrestling. They cover the #GiveDivasAChance movement, the aesthetics of gear, and the importance of seeing women in main-event spots. They write thoughtful pieces about how Evolution 2 arrives years after the first show, yet still reflects an uneven investment in women's wrestling.

But week-to-week booking? That rarely cuts.

Many feminist journalists don't watch SmackDown and Dynamite with the granular attention that hardcore fans do. They see the big moments and the marketing beats, not the quiet weeks where the women vanish from the card or get eight minutes before a commercial break.

So AEW's "one match" problem surfaces when it aligns with big tent-pole narratives, historic stadium shows, milestone events, but WWE's "zero match" weeks slip by because they're just that: ordinary Fridays on Fox.

What Consistent Outrage Would Look Like

If we applied the AEW standard to WWE, the conversation would change overnight.

When SmackDown and Raw air women-less episodes back-to-back, we wouldn't describe that as "surprising" or "disappointing." We'd call it what it is: a structural failure. 

We'd ask:

• Why does a company with three women's world titles, tag belts, and a women's mid-card title still struggle to fit even one women's match on a flagship show?

• Why do women's segments get cut first when time runs short?

• Why do women need special occasions (Evolution, Elimination Chamber, Money in the Bank) to get focus instead of reliable weekly storytelling?

  
  

We'd push wrestling media to track the data, the same way they track AEW: number of women's matches per show, average length, storyline continuity, and pay-per-view representation. We'd demand that mainstream feminist outlets treat wrestling's gender politics as more than a side quest.

And we'd stop accepting that an occasional all-women's pay-per-view wipes away months of uneven booking.

AEW Still Deserves Pressure—Just Not Alone

None of this exonerates AEW.

A promotion that markets itself as a progressive alternative must do better than one woman's match lasting eight minutes per Dynamite. The company just proved how powerful women's wrestling can be: the first-ever women's Blood & Guts match on Dynamite in November 2025 drove one of the show's best ratings of the year and generated rave reviews for the performers' creativity and physicality.

If AEW can trust women with its most violent, high-risk gimmick match and draw ratings, it can trust them with more than a single TV slot and a rushed build to the pay-per-view.

But AEW shouldn't be the only lightning rod when WWE ghost-books its women's division for an entire weekend while hyping a "new era" that deserves the same ferocity of critique.

What Fans and Feminists Can Do Next

So what does a more honest outrage look like?

1. Track the numbers for both companies. Fans already track AEW's women's match counts and times. Extend that energy to WWE. Treat "zero women's matches" as a headline, not a footnote.

2. Call out inconsistency, not just optics. Applaud Evolution 2 for existing, but ask why its announcement came late, why titles went undefended, and why the weekly booking doesn't match the big-event rhetoric.

3. Push wrestling media for equal scrutiny. When you read reviews, ask: Did the writer even mention that there were no women's matches on this show? If not, why? When the media criticize AEW, ask them to put WWE under the same microscope.

4. Encourage feminist outlets to treat wrestling seriously. Wrestling's gender politics intersect with labor, race, queerness, and body politics. Feminist critics who write about the WNBA, women's soccer, or NCAA NIL deals can absolutely write about how two billion-dollar wrestling companies handle their women's rosters.

5. Listen to the wrestlers themselves.AEW and WWE women routinely hint at frustration over TV time and storytelling, even in carefully controlled interviews. Deonna Purrazzo has talked about limited TV exposure in AEW; WWE women have repeatedly used social media to draw attention to their sidelining.

Their voices should anchor the conversation, not sit in the background while fans fight brand wars.

The Bottom Line: Outrage Without Favoritism

If you care about women's wrestling, you don't pick a side; you like a standard.

That standard should say:

• Zero women's matches on a main roster TV show is unacceptable.

• One woman's match on a multi-hour show is not much better.

• "We did an all-women's pay-per-view once (or twice) " doesn't erase months of marginalization.

• A company's marketing, history, or streaming deals don't exempt it from criticism.

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AEW has earned plenty of heat for doing the bare minimum with a talented women's roster. WWE has earned plenty of praise for marquee moments and historic firsts. Both things can be true.

But as long as fans flood the timeline whenever AEW runs a women's match, and shrug when WWE runs none, the message to both promotions remains muddy.

If wrestling media and feminist critics want to be taken seriously on this issue, the outrage can't stop at the Daily's Place entrance. It has to walk straight through Titan Towers, too.