Women in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

I recently got back into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) after being out of training for a year and a half. To be honest, I don't know if I should even count the training I did in 2014, as I only trained for about 3 to 5  months and stopped due to commuting and work. My better half has been training BJJ for a while now and we go watch IBJJF competitions (IBJJF: International Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Federation), such as the World's Championship or the Pan-American Championship whenever they are going on in Southern California.

With the rise of female fighters in the UFC such as Ronda Rousey (my personal favorite and my idol), and female grapplers like Mackenzie Dern, I've been more excited to join in on what has traditionally been a male-dominated sport.

For this blog post, I decided to look at the share of women competitors at the Pan-Ams (which in the past few years has been the biggest BJJ tournament in the planet) over time. The data shows that women have been making up a greater share of competitors in the last few years. In 2012, about 24% of white belts were women, and this past year 37% of white belts competitors were women. For almost every belt level, the share of women competing went up. Brown belts declined from 2014 to 2015. Overall, women competitors went from making up 15% of competitors in 2012 to 22% in 2015.

I'm excited to see that women are making up greater shares of competitors.  I plan on scraping more data from the IBJJF website to get a bigger picture of competitors for all tournaments and will update with new numbers if the data exists. 

This data was parsed from registrations for the Pan Jiu Jitsu Championship from ibjjf.com using Stata.
​2013 Data is missing. Graph was made with Google Charts API.
Analysis is for adult women and men only (excludes juvenile, master, or senior competitors).