Gender divide?

[Doc Harry]

I think it was the Duke of Wellington who once said: "There are only three sports: hunting*, shooting and fishing. All the rest are but games."

* Hunting as in fox hunting.

:focus:

And Hemingway said, "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."

 

[Alex777]

On Grand Cayman, where diving is a highly social (and sociable) activity, I would say that about 40 - 50% of resident divers are women. Several of the dive sites are located at restaurant / bars. You can climb up the ladder and be schmoozing (or being schmoozed by) some guy at the bar within 5 minutes.

 

[TSandM]

Men don't dominate all sports. My other activity is dressage, which is an Olympic sport and is probably, at least in the US, 90% female. My husband is the odd man in that area, just as I'm the strange one in the tech diving realm.

 

[GrumpyOldGuy]

Men don't dominate all sports. My other activity is dressage, which is an Olympic sport and is probably, at least in the US, 90% female. My husband is the odd man in that area, just as I'm the strange one in the tech diving realm.

This just goes to demonstrate how people tend to judge on initial impressions.

How do you get young men interested in a sport with dresses <sic>

Maybe women also make an initial negative decision about scuba when they see all the hardware that must be managed before they see all the really cool stuff underwater? I would imagine it is pretty easy for a women (and some men) to be overwhelmed by the shear size and mass of the (man sized?) gear to be handled topside without realizing that once they are submerged they are on a level playing field.

 

[cmaha76]

I got into Scuba because of the wife. The dive shop we travel with is owned by a male/female team and on our trips it's usually around 50/50. When we've traveled without the shop it seems like it's usually 70/30. The interesting thing is, we're usually one of the only couples. A

nother local dive shop is owned by a wife/husband team and their shop and meetings tend to go 50/50 as well.

I wonder if the fact that the dive shops I frequent have female ownership changes the clientelle or if it's just coincidence.

 

[diver 85]

and-----girls love it, guys hate it......

 

[H2O Gal]

Interesting thread!
I did a liveaboard last year and it seems like we were almost 50/50.
I totally agree with the women and cold water observation....I'm not crazy about it. For me it's not a matter of being cold because I'm an avid skier, or the extra weight needed to sink because of the thicker wetsuits-it's the wetsuits themselves...I HATE 'em! I'd dive nekkid if it wouldn't scare the fish......

 

[TSandM]

I would imagine it is pretty easy for a women (and some men) to be overwhelmed by the shear size and mass of the (man sized?) gear to be handled topside without realizing that once they are submerged they are on a level playing field.

I don't think its just appearances. I know that my cave gear weighs as much as I do, and moving it around on land is an enormous challenge. It isn't even just strength -- it's being vertically challenged, too. Where a guy six feet tall can pick something up using his biceps muscles and put it on a table still using them, for me, the table height means the object can't just hang -- I have to bench press it, basically.

I suspect most women are smarter than I am, and look at cave and tech diving and say it's just going to be too much work

 

[Herk_Man]

Males dominate in all sports. I believe it's because of social up-bringing and social expectations.

Just like women dominate in knitting. It is an activity that nothing to do with gender, but it's taught socially only to women.

Not in field hockey.

 

[Cathy Church]

Women knit because they can do that while watching the children while the husband is diving. We are still dominated by the roles handed to us. When I was studying marine biology in the 60s, I dropped out at a masters level because they were not allowing women into the research stations nor onto the research ships. I could not get a job with California state fish and game as a marine fish ecologist because they were not hiring women divers. These ideas about the ability of women are slowly, every so slowly, changing. In this generation, if you watched the Olympics, young women can still be considered datable material even though they can careen down a mountain on skies at a million miles an hour, or flip over on a snowboard in a half pipe. Women are still just learning that they really CAN.