Gender and Minority Troubles?

I've commented many times on the deeply troubling gender and ethnic minority imbalance in amateur radio.

Whilst this is not unique to the UK, or the RSGB, the UK's representative society is a good place to keep an eye on the image presented to the wider public.

This month's RadCom, the RSGB magazine (not available in any shop), carries a rather flag-waving cover that tries to claim amateur radio has made some kind of difference to the Covid-19 crisis.  A lot of happy faces are presented as some numerical 'evidence' of this positive influence.

Let's look at those faces.  I can see 38 in total.

Of those, 33 (86.8%) are male, 4 (10.5%) are female, and 1 (2.6%) is of two dogs at the rig(?)

None are of anybody who has anything other than white skin (but the dogs are brown).

23 (60.5%) are comfortably identifiable as of an older, post-retirement age group.

9 (23.7%) of men are wearing a full phones-and-mic headset.  None of the women are.

Although this is not a scientific analysis by any means, it is still not wildly away from what we know amateur radio is like.  It is hardly suprising, faced with those statistics, that we struggle to attract more people to the hobby.  Like Sir Trevor McDonald, the famous newsreader says on an advert currently running, "we are changed by what we see, just as we are changed when we are seen".