Amanda Serrano and Danila Ramos Plan to Show They Can Box by Men’s Rules

When Amanda Serrano trains for a championship fight, she often spars with men for at least a dozen three-minute rounds, using the standard male regulation format to push her athleticism to the edge.

But when she gets into the ring for real, the fight goes for only 10 two-minute rounds, the standard for women’s boxing.

On Friday she will compete in the first women’s title fight in 15 years that has been sanctioned under men’s rules, and only the second one ever. It will also be the biggest, as title belts from three of the four major boxing sanctioning organizations will be up for grabs.

“We’re able to showcase it on a worldwide stage,” Serrano said. “I want to show that we’re capable of doing this.”

Serrano, 35, a seven-division boxing world champion and undisputed featherweight champion from Carolina, P.R., will face off against Danila Ramos, 38, from São Paulo, Brazil. Serrano will defend her title from the World Boxing Organization, the World Boxing Association and the International Boxing Federation.

Serrano will enter the ring on Friday with a record of 45-2-1 and 30 knockouts, one of the best in women’s boxing and only two knockouts short of tying the women’s record. Ramos has a 12-2-0 record with one knockout. The fight will be held at the Caribe Royale in Orlando, Fla., and will be streamed starting at 9 p.m. Eastern on DAZN, a sports subscription service.

For Serrano, the match is about more than stats and titles. She is seeking to change a sport that has long struggled with equity.

Male and female athletes have competed under different rules for generations. In professional basketball, women play 10-minute quarters while men play 12 minutes. In tennis, women compete in a best-of-three format during Grand Slam tournaments while men play best-of-five sets. In boxing, 16 minutes separate the men from the women.

Serrano and other boxers say an equal playing field has been a long time coming, especially when it comes to pay.

A 12-round fight might attract a bigger audience, said Nakisa Bidarian, a co-founder of Most Valuable Productions, which promotes Serrano. “If you put on a more exciting product,” he said. “You will get paid more.”

Fans are more likely to see an all-out punches-in-bunches brawl of a finish in a three-minute round, Bidarian said. That’s something that he said women’s boxing “generally misses versus the men’s side of it.”

The Friday fight was sanctioned by the Florida Athletic Commission and three of the major boxing bodies. Bidarian said the World Boxing Commission, the fourth major agency, would never sanction a 12-round fight for women. The commission, which has cited a study that suggests women are more susceptible to concussions than men, did not respond to a request for comment.

Bidarian said that he recognized longer fights increase the risk of injury, but that “this is about two professional athletes having the right to compete how they want to.”

The fight is being…