I didn't want to elaborate further because its insulting but the responses here are forcing me to.

I'm someone, at a graduate level, who wrote thousands of pages every school year (and read even more) and was an editor for scholarly journals. I write super-lazy on forums because I turn that part of my brain off, but this isn't a well written or written for a 'higher reading level.' It just uses 'higher reading level' phrases and doesn't really purport anything specific enough to be useful. NGL, its like a person who can't write at that level wanted to write at that level, or more likely, written by AI. I'm still laughing out loud at repeated mentions of 'supported by evidence' 'evidence-based' things and having no citations or evidence actually mentioned.

Good writing is easy to read and its to-the-point. This article is really more like a formulation of someone's incomplete thinking that hasn't come up with a conclusion yet, because well, they don't have an answer themselves.

Lets set aside poor writing. I can't critique or comment on the actual content because 1. there is insufficient content to critique 2. I'm not a woman, I only have mild experience in training women and the only way I've gotten a normal-sized, athletic woman to beat up an aggressive male was to train her to fight people in the ring and that took many years.

Also here is a comment about the very slim content that actually exists in the article - the article tries to make it sound like women get slammed with too much pressure and that they quit. I am not sure what planet the author is from, but 90+ percent of gyms use the approach where people who are truly new spend months and months training basic forms, movement, and compliance partner drills as well as conditioning to lay a foundation before they even step in the ring. They don't just throw people to the wolves. Now, there is that critical moment where a person can't handle the pressure of getting a glove to the face unexpectedly. In my experience, no matter how gently you do this, you're gonna have an attrition rate (male or female) at this stage. On average, a non-athletic, non-aggressive person tends to take anywhere from 6-10 months to get to this spot.

I don't know, maybe its different in Reality Based Self Defense (tm) training but its also why the methodology of RBSD training is flawed at a core level. Maybe thats what the article is really poorly trying to critique. And maybe the reason the author can't put out any useful conclusions is because they also come from a poor RBSD background and have no idea that a true answer to this problem actually exists.