Quote

I did see the Yahoo Sports story Kevin Iole wrote about how the ratings for TUF go up when there's a women's fight in the episode. I can't lie: it felt really good to see that the UFC fans - not only MMA fans but fans of the UFC who maybe hadn't seen any female fights before February of this year - look forward to watching the women fights so much.

People like myself have been pushing, competing, and promoting female MMA for a long time, and to see the fans accept a female division in the UFC so quickly is vindication that all that hard work amounted to something.

As a female athlete, I think it's really important to stand up on a podium and represent females and what we're capable of, and I always try to make political statements with what I do rather than with headlines.

Every single woman that fights MMA has done just as much work as Ronda has; we just haven't gotten as much turnaround. Those women who came before her haven't been on magazine covers. They weren't plastered everywhere by the UFC. They didn't get the same reward back.

There are so many ridiculous arguments that MMA is somehow anti-woman.

I believe that athletes - especially female athletes in the world's leading sport for women - should serve as role models.

I'm a woman who's been in a man's sport since the age of 15, and to see people finally seeing what I saw right from the start, that female fighters are just as good 'pound-for-pound' as our male counterparts.

When you're watching people in non-title fights making four times the amount of money that a champion makes, it takes away the flavor of being a champion.

I think that the potential of Total Divas and female athletes is that the sky is the limit. People want to know about these women, and in the WWE, we call it the Divas Revolution - it's a movement for women's empowerment.

There's a power in women being women. There's a role for men, but we don't have to be men, because we're women. I think that representing that on television is a cool thing.