We only have 5 adult females in our group (soon to go up to 7) as we're a pretty small new group, and most of them came to this group because they didn't fight and didn't want to sit around doing nothing (our group is trying to put a high focus on things like games, needlework etc that can be (and are) done at shows, so we really haven't had the time to attract females looking for a place to fight. So I fell a bit hypocritical saying "yeah! females can fight if they want, just not a single female in our group wants to".
I know what you mean about the 'unfairness' thing. I mean, I don't know of any group who has sepperate fights for age, weight or ability, so why sex, when that cannot really be proven to be a ability gap?
My brother who is 18 and has been learning to fight for not very long (about a year?) fought for the first time in a public tournament, againt people age 18-50, and some of which had been fighting for longer than he's been alive. He died- a LOT, but thats war, its not fair, and the best way to learn is by fighting those better than you and learning from them. At the end of thebweekend,he was already getting in a few hits before dying, so he improved! Of course, thats not to say men are better than women at all, but even if someone thinks they are, I still don't buy the 'unfair argument'.
What do you mean by what kind of fighting? We are a metal weapons group, but other than that I don't even know which fighting manuscripts they work off (though I think one of them is German, because there has been some debate about the difference between german and Italian fighting).