K4YZ wrote:
The following is from the ARRL website...I brought over the first
paragraphs as a starting point. The remainder may be read in it's
entirety at www.arrl.org.

My question: Is this even an issue?

Less than .01% of all quilters are male...Is quilting about to
burn out?

Is there some great conspiracy to prevent women from testing? Are
there armed guards at the doors to bar their entrance? If so, I've
never seen them.


It seems to be the same with many technical careers or hobbies. There
is a lot of effort to recruit women to the engineering ranks. But not
that many appear to be attracted to it.

Perhaps we need to have tight control over this sort of thing. A
carreer / hobby lottery, so to speak. When you are in 6th grade, you
draw at random two things, a career slip and a hobby slip. And that is
what ya train for and do from then on. Strict control will have to be
exercised in order to enforce gender equity!

I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty goofy to me.

That there are less women in the ARS is true enough. But that is
interesting from a "why is that?" standpoint. It probably isn't so
interesting from a "how do we change Ham radio to attract more women?"
aspect.

Dee or Kim might be able to shed some light on that, in form of "Why I
am interested in Amateur radio" or perhaps some insight on why a lot of
women aren't.

- Mike KB3EIA -


QUOTE:
A Study of Amateur Radio Gender Demographics

By Ken Harker, WM5R
March 15, 2005

One of the under-represented demographics in the Amateur Radio world is
women. Everyone knows that there are many fewer female hams than there
are male hams, both among those licensed and those active on the air.
As a competitor at some of the major Amateur Radio Direction Finding
(ARDF) meets, I've noticed that the womens' entry categories have
had only about a fifth as many entrants as the mens' categories. As
an HF phone contester, I've observed that a very small percentage of
my QSOs are made with women operators (as low as 2%!). So how many
women Amateur Radio operators are there?

UNQUOTE