HEY! Where the HEMA Women At?: A Graphical Analysis of Women’s Tournaments and Participation

Ever wonder about the prevalence of women competitors and tournaments tailored for them at events? Well, we’re going to take a little dive into the fHEMAle world now.

The data we’ll be looking at was provided by HEMA Ratings. The data has information on various events from 2012 through 2021 with data points for the number of competitors in mixed longsword tournaments, the number of competitors in women’s longsword tournaments, and the number of competitors that overlap between the two. Along the way, I will demonstrate how you always have to question your data and mess with it a little bit to tell a more accurate story, because statistics lie.

A couple things to keep in mind about this data:

• For this article, we are concerned with only mixed longsword and women’s longsword events. There are some events which don’t offer mixed or women’s longsword tournaments. They do exist! We’ve eliminated these 77 events from the data before putting it into the graphs so they don’t do wonky things to various calculations.
• HEMA Ratings does not contain information for every single HEMA event. This is especially true for events occurring prior to 2016. Keep this in the back of your mind while you are reading through.
• The data is presented at the event-level. This means that we do not have insight into the individual competitors. There is no way to know if a competitor competed at just one event or ten. Realistically, who has the vacation time for ten events in any given year? Maybe the Europeans. The point is, the various counts you’ll see in the graphs below are the sum of competitors at the events rather than the count of distinct competitors.
• There is no way to definitively identify a competitor as male or female. I mean, I’ve never had to identify my gender on an event registration form, have you? Therefore, we must use the count of competitors in women’s tournaments as a proxy for the number of women at an event. Additionally, we identify women who compete in mixed longsword tournaments by comparing the names of the mixed longsword participants to those in the women’s tournaments. This means that we could be missing the ladies who only take pleasure in beating up men and participate solely in mixed tournaments. This becomes quite problematic when looking at events that don’t offer women’s longsword tournaments, therefore a lot of these graphs limit their analysis to just those events which offer women’s tournaments in addition to mixed tournaments.
• COVID messed with things. Expect to see data that doesn’t follow volume trends in 2020 and 2021.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way… time for some graphs!

A Look At Event Count

The first interesting statistic to look at is exactly how often women’s tournaments are offered at events.

In this graph, the total bar represents the number of events with mixed longsword tournaments, with orange being the share that also offers a women’s tournament. The red line shows the percentage of times women’s tournaments are offered.

What this graph tells us is that the number of events in general has grown dramatically, from just three in 2012 to 144 in 2019 (as mentioned, we see wonky things happening in the most recent years because of COVID). Not only does the overall number of tournaments increase over time, but also the raw number of women’s events. In fact, women’s events are growing at a faster pace than mixed events, as indicated by the red line. One supposition is that existing events that previously offered only mixed longsword are adding women’s longsword to their roster of tournaments in addition to new events having women’s longsword at inception.

An Understanding of Event Participation

While we can consider just the increase of offerings of women’s tournaments at events, it would also be prudent to look at participation in these events. Some of these graphs won’t focus specifically on women’s tournaments or participation, but it helps to tell the story.

To begin, we will look at the number of competitors in mixed tournaments.

This histogram shows us how many mixed tournaments on the y-axis contain the number of participants along the x-axis. The blue bars are in increments of 10 participants, so the first bar represents the number of tournaments having 1-9 competitors, the second bar being the number of tournaments having 10-19 competitors, and so on. 

As we can see from this graph, the number of small tournaments has increased greatly over time, whereas larger tournaments have increased at a more moderate rate.

We can see similar trends when looking at women’s tournaments, with small tournaments increasing more rapidly than larger tournaments.

The bars in this graph are in increments of 5 participants rather than 10.

So what about the total number of participants for events? Isn’t that a great stat to look at? Well, not really, but we’ll look at it anyway.

What we see with this graph is that the number of competitors at events has skyrocketed over the years, with almost an exponential trend. It also seems to suggest that there are an almost comparable number of competitors at events which only offer mixed tournaments to those of events which offer both mixed and women’s tournaments.

So why do I say that this isn’t really a good metric to look at? This graph will explain it a bit more.

This visualization shows us that the average number of participants at events which only have mixed events is smaller than the average number of participants at events which offer both mixed and women’s tournaments. Remember the earlier histogram that showed that smaller events are increasing at a faster rate than larger events? The volume of small events is what drives up the raw number of participants rather than it being the classification of events with mixed only versus mixed and women’s events.

An interesting thing to note about participation in general is that the average number of participants at events seems to be on the decline. It is quite apparent for events that offer both mixed and women’s tournaments, which also drives down the size of events overall. Though this may seem counterintuitive to the previous graph which shows large increases in participation, remember that we cannot determine the number of unique participants in a given year. The average number of participants removes the chance for duplicate individuals because you can only register once for an event.

Let’s take a closer look at the idea that larger tournaments offer women’s tournaments:

This histogram shows the percentage of times a women’s tournament is offered compared to how large the mixed tournament is. The bars are in size increments of 10.

As we can see from this histogram, smaller events tend not to offer women’s tournaments as often as their larger counterparts. We can also see that those percentages do not shift much over time.

Women’s Tournaments Participation

So what about the actual participation of women in tournaments? We have ladies who participate in both mixed tournaments and women’s tournaments, and then we have those who only compete in women’s tournaments. We will dive into the former cohort first. Keep in mind that for this section we have eliminated any tournaments which do not offer women’s events from the analysis.

We’ll start by looking at another bad representation of data. Keep in mind what was said at the beginning of this article: these analyses underestimate the actual amount of women competing because we do not have insight into which participants who only participate in the mixed tournaments are actually women.

Again, this one is not quite telling the right story because we are looking at the count of participants. Similar to the earlier graph of total event participants, we have the problem of event count driving up the number of participants because a person can compete at multiple events. However, we do see a somewhat interesting piece of information that shows that the percentage of competitors in both the mixed & women’s tournaments is overall increasing.

We should probably look at another graph.

Once again, the average number of participants paints a much clearer picture. We see that the average number of people who only compete in mixed tournaments has decreased over time, which jives with our other look at event participation that showed a decrease. We do, however, see that the average number of women who compete in both mixed and women’s tournaments has remained relatively stable at approximately 1 to 3 competitors per mixed tournament year over year. Because the average number of mixed-only participants is going down while the average mixed-and-women’s participants remains stagnant, it artificially inflates the percentage of women participating in both events.

Now, what about statistics for women’s tournaments in particular? Let’s take a look.

This time I’m not even going to take you down the rabbit hole of showing you a misleading graph before telling you the better way to interpret the data. Instead, I’ve slapped the average line right on this graph. As with mixed tournaments and overall event participation, we see the same almost-exponential trend of increasing participants, but when looking at the average number of participants, we see a decreasing trend.

Now let’s dive into women’s tournament participation versus mixed tournament participation.

We see here that the mixed tournament participation growth (teal) looks huge in comparison to the women’s tournament participation growth (orange). However, is it fair to say that mixed participation is outpacing women’s participation? We have a graph for that!

This graph shows us the percent increase of tournament participants year over year. Keeping with the same color schema as above, we see that there are some years where women’s tournament participation growth exceeds that of mixed tournament participation growth. Depending on your year range for calculating the percent increase, you could certainly make your case for either group to be growing faster. If we look at the percent increase between 2012 and 2019, we have a 3761% increase for mixed tournaments participation and a 3375% increase for women’s tournaments participation, so somewhat similar growth.

Another interesting thing to look at is how many women participate exclusively in women’s tournaments.

The total bar represents the average number of participants in a women’s tournament, teal represents the women who participate in both mixed and women’s, and orange is the women who participate in just women’s tournaments. From this visualization, we can see the steady decline in the average number of participants by year as we discussed in the graph above. However, in this graph, we see that the percentage of women who participate exclusively in women’s tournaments is declining. Does this mean that more women are becoming comfortable participating in mixed tournaments? The blue line would indicate that, right?

How about we look at the graph like this instead.

Here we’ve flipped which color is on the bottom to be able to compare the values a bit better. While it was hard to see when teal was on top, we can now better see that the number of women who participate in mixed tournaments doesn’t actually shift a whole lot, going between 1-3 women (which is the same statistic we saw in the prior discussion about average number of women in mixed tournaments, if you recall). The decreasing number of women in women’s tournaments is what is driving the percent exclusivity down, not that more women are participating in mixed tournaments.

Are Some Countries Better for Women than Others?

The last thing we’re going to dig into is a country-level view of women’s tournaments. We will look at data from 2019 only because it has the largest number of tournaments offered, thus providing enough data points to maybe be considered a valid analysis (but that’s a loose maybe).

One basic metric is how many times women’s tournaments are offered in each country.

The orange bar shows the number of women’s tournaments offered at events during the year, and the blue dots tell us what percentage of the time women’s tournaments were offered at events. One thing to point out is that most of the 0% countries only had 1-3 events in total, with Spain having offered 6 events. The US and Italy have the most tournaments for women in terms of volume, but the US performs poorly in the actual percentage of events offering women’s tournaments.

Now let’s look at women’s participation by country. The first thing I want to show is the number of participants in women’s tournaments by country to illustrate another point about graphs concealing the truth.

Again, we don’t know how many of these participants are unique, but that isn’t the only problem here. Let’s take a look at the US, which has the highest number of event participants, and Italy, the second highest by about half. What we do not consider in this graph is that the US has just over twice the population of Italy, so of course they’re going to naturally have a larger amount of raw individuals interested in HEMA. If we wanted to be rigorous, we could look at this in some type of per capita view, but I’m lazy, so we’re not going to… we’re just going to caveat that we are looking at raw counts of individuals.

Let’s take another look at participation.

Here we see the average number of women participating in women’s tournaments by country in orange, the percentage of the overall event population represented by women as a blue dot, and the percentage of overall event population when excluding events not having a women’s tournament as the red dot. If no red dot is showing, that means all events at a given country had a women’s tournament, and therefore the red and blue dots are equal. 

Based on the percentage of events and the number of participants at events, we can also look at the amount of opportunity for each country. In a previous  section, we saw a discrepancy in the amount of event participants between events that do and do not offer women’s events; what we will try to figure out is how many additional participants could be gathered at an event if all events offered women’s tournaments.

The first thing to point out is the large number of countries that have zero opportunity; this is because some of those countries already had a 100% rate of offering women’s tournaments while the others did not have a single women’s tournament to establish what the increase is when offering women’s tournaments. The opportunity for more participants is the highest, by far, in the US, which has an estimated increase of over 150 participants if all events offered women’s tournaments.

And What About Mixed Tournaments By Country?

We can also look at the average number of women participating in both women’s and mixed tournaments.

If we want to take a step back and compare participation in the US in comparison to all other countries, we see the following.

What this graph shows is that the US has a much higher percentage of women who compete in mixed tournaments than all other countries. 

To Wrap It Up

Now that you have graph fatigue, you may have forgotten some of the key points from this article. I’ll sum it up for you:

• More women’s tournaments are being offered at events. The same is true for mixed tournaments. The exciting thing for the female HEMA community is that women’s tournaments are growing at a faster rate than mixed tournaments!

• The new tournaments that are being offered tend to have fewer participants. This means that the average number of participants at tournaments has gone down. This is true for both women’s and mixed tournaments.

• Even though the average number of participants at events has gone down, the amount of total participation has gone up! The overall percent increase of women’s tournament participation is about the same as mixed tournament participation. Keep in mind that it’s very difficult to tell if this means that the number of individual HEMA competitors is up or if it just means that the same competitors are showing up to every tournament. Spoiler: there may be a future article on this.

• Women’s participation in mixed tournaments has remained the same over the years, with about 1-3 participants on average per mixed tournament. However, it is important to remember that this is underestimated because of the way data is collected.

• The US offers the highest number of women’s tournaments out of all countries looked at. However, the US also has one of the lowest percentages of women’s tournaments offered at events, with only about one of every four events offering a women’s tournament. There’s huge room for improvement on this!

• In the US, women make up about 15% of an event’s participants if a women’s tournament is offered. If all events offered women’s tournaments in 2019, there would have been about 155 more participants across these events. To all the event organizers out there– this seems like low-hanging fruit to get some easy registration $$$.

• Lastly, data and graphs can be misleading; sometimes it’s done on purpose, but I’d like to think it usually happens because the person throwing together the charts and statistics doesn’t have an analytical background or maybe doesn’t have the subject background to ask the right questions of the data (full disclaimer– I’m not perfect either, and I’ve been doing this for over ten years). Always think about what is being shown to you, whether it can have more than one interpretation, or if more information is needed to draw a solid conclusion.

All The Data