Mandy Rose posted a photo with her mother for International Women’s Day, as seen below. WWE has been focussing on women’s wrestling since the Women’s Revolution initiated by the WWE Chief Brand Officer Stephanie McMahon. While many former female stars were underutilized in the company, the former WWE star Gail Kim wishes that Stephanie was more outspoken about women’s empowerment during her stint in the company. Kim had a couple of stints with WWE. She had a brief run in WWE from 2003-to 2004 and the second stint between 2008 and 2011.
Gail Kim opens up on Stephanie McMahon
The female stars were referred to as ‘Divas’ which meant based on sex appeal. But that changed as in 2016 at WrestleMania 32, WWE abandoned the term and introduced a new WWE Women’s Championship, disbanding the Divas title.
Gail Kim noted how Stephanie has been backing the women’s division over the past seven years. She added that all of that blame cannot be projected onto Stephanie solely as Gail believes it was the WWE Chairman Vince McMahon who was not a fan of women’s wrestling at one point which prevented them to become a more important part of the show.
I’ve never seen any indication of her [Stephanie McMahon] — at that time, listen, Stephanie was nice, Stephanie was professional with us backstage but in no way did I ever feel like she was fighting for us. I didn’t feel like anybody was fighting for us to be honest. I’m not just gonna put it on Stephanie, although, you know, if she — right now, she’s always been women empowerment since the women’s revolution so, I wish she would have been more like that before. I’m not gonna lie, I did wish that. If anything, we had Fit [Finlay] in our corner, being our agent most of the time but I think Fit was also like one of us in the sense of fear-based positioning without the producers. They’re all scared for their jobs, so they’re more like robots in the sense of taking the business from their meaning and what Vince [McMahon] wants from us, so, they can’t necessarily fight for us because they’re worried about their position, right? So Fit could only fight oh so much for us which we understood. I just thought it was a losing battle because Vince never liked women’s wrestling. You know, that’s what you chalk it up to. You know, making assumptions when you don’t have answers so…”
Gail formally retired from in-ring competition in 2019 and continues to serve as the producer in IMPACT Wrestling.
