Heather Hardy first entered a boxing gym at age 28. At the time, she was a young mother, recently divorced, and couldn’t find a job in her chosen field. Concerned, her sister gave her a gift certificate for lessons at the gym. Introduced to kickboxing and then later boxing, Hardy felt she finally had an answer to the elusive question: “what was I born to do?”

“I was like, ‘now I know what I’m going to do with my life’,” Hardy says. “It gave me something to focus on.”

Within just three weeks of learning to lace up her gloves, Hardy began kickboxing competition – and within 11 months was ranked the No 1 amateur boxer in the US. Her boxing career continued that way until she had “won everything there was to possibly win”.

“After nationals, regionals, state, metro, Golden Gloves, there was no one left for me to fight,” she says.

Almost 10 years later, however, pay disparities forced Hardy to make the difficult decision to shift her focus from the sport she fell in love with to mixed martial arts, a pursuit she says couldn’t be more different from boxing.

“Boxing is a sport, it’s fun, a game – it’s like tag, it’s like dancing,” she says. “In MMA, they lock you up in a cage with someone who wants to kill you. This is a person who wants to make you stop breathing, break your arms, snap your kneecaps, kick your face in. These are people who really want to hurt someone. In boxing, I don’t think I ever felt like I wanted to hurt someone.”

The truth, says Hardy, is that her “heart and soul” remains with boxing, but at 36, she can’t continue to suffer from the gender pay gap at the sport’s core.

“When I was turning pro, at the time one of the other pro women at [renowned New York boxing gym] Gleason’s told me not to bother. She said, ‘girls don’t really make money doing this. Don’t feel like it’s your job, it’s a hobby.’”

There was no malice in the comment, according to Hardy, only a realistic picture of where women’s boxing was at.



“It wasn’t until 1995 that women were even allowed to compete in the Golden Gloves, or 1997 until the first national championships for women were held in the USA,” she says. “Women weren’t even allowed to box in gyms until the early 1990s. Bruce Silvergrade, who runs Gleason’s, often talks about having to close the gym down and let women in at night to use the boxing ring to spar.”

Despite those barriers, however, Hardy says she had no hesitation in making the transition: “When I was turning pro [in 2012] it was the first year they were letting women box in the Olympics. So my choices were: stay in the amateurs for another four years and train for the Olympics, or go pro.

“I was nearly 30, and while I knew the pay wasn’t going to be equal, I thought that was going to be the second part of my job: not just to fight and win and beat up the girls, but to fight and win and get recognition for women’s boxing, get money for it, get on the big stage for it.”

Getting women’s boxing on the big stage, however, wasn’t straightforward. On the verge of her first ever professional bout, Hardy had to fundraise US$13,000 in tickets just for the privilege of entering the ring. It took three fights, each of which she raised over US$10,000 for, before a promoter finally signed her.

Hardy has never lost a fight in the boxing ring. Photograph: Supplied

But the inequality didn’t stop there. By her 15th fight, Hardy was undefeated as a pro, and defending her WBC title at the Barclays Center against the No 2 contender. After a 10-round, gruelling fight, she took home US$7,000. The man who entered the ring after her – same number of rounds, same record, fighting a much-lower-ranked competitor – took home US$150,000. Such an extreme gap in pay and conditions, says Hardy, becomes cyclical.

“These men are then able to take six weeks off, have an entire fight camp, their gym is paid for, their sparring partners are paid for, their trainers are paid for, and they get a nice lump sum to go on vacation with, and pay their bills,” she says.

“By the time I get paid, and pay my gym dues, my trainers, and all my late bills because I’ve had 12 weeks with no pay ... I’m usually in the hole. I have to sell tickets, pay for things like t-shirts because I don’t get sponsorships. The pay disparity is overwhelming. It’s not 60-40%, we’re talking like 95-5%.”

Switching to MMA, says Hardy, was in part about being fed up with having to be “grateful” for being given the chance to box at all.



“We live in a society where men make women feel like we need to be thankful for your spot, for them giving you a chance, because if it wasn’t you they’d give it to someone else,” she says.

“Sometimes you have to be quiet and accept that shit until you have a loud enough voice to say: ‘I’m not taking this anymore.’ I think that’s where I got to in my career ... I’ve made more in three MMA fights than I ever made in the boxing ring.”

Hardy’s MMA debut, at Madison Square Garden, was watched by over 600,000 on TV and attended by another 30,000. She won by knockout, and says her fan-base increased “five times” as a result.

With the extra money and exposure, Hardy is now focusing her attention on training the next generation of women fighters as head coach at fitness boxing studio Shadowbox – where pay and gender equity underpins teaching and business practice.



“People say that learning through me is about taking the principles of boxing to translate into your other life,” she explains.

“[After my MMA debut] I started to hear from people who were like me or had the same doubts as me growing up ... people who were working class or lower class, women who have been through abuse. I feel like it’s my responsibility to tell them, any bad thing that happens to you – it isn’t a definition of who you are, it’s just a part of your story.”

As far as Hardy’s own motivation to keep fighting goes, however, she never has to look too far.



“I have a constant reminder every single day, when my daughter comes crawling out of her bedroom, that I’m not just fighting to fight, that I’m fighting for all girls like my daughter,” she says.

“I never wanted her to feel like she was sorry she was a girl, that she was sorry she was good at something she shouldn’t be.”