Hi girls
I'm based in Wellington, NZ, and we've recently been asking the same questions over here. We have a fantastic club with many volunteers and some of the countries top riders as members who are friendly and approachable. I thought I might share some of what we've found on here as it may be of interest to anyone who is trying to improve racing numbers. (This is XC based because that's our club's focus - there is a seperate club for DH and currently only 1 woman competing, though I may do this years series if I have time...)
A couple of us did a very rough and informal survey on a couple of websites and got about 20 women responding. We looked at reasons for not racing, reasons for racing, factors that would encourage women to race.
There were 4 main reasons given why they weren't racing - not being fit enough, prefering more social events, the race environment and other riders (seems really common here too) and simply not having the inclination.
The fitness factor is something the club can probably help with by arranging womens rides and getting them out more often - offers of this have been well received and it looks like it's the same here.
Social events - there is an annual womens only triathlon run in the main centres in NZ every summer for the last 4 or 5 years. This attracted 4000!! women in Wellington and 7000!!! women in Auckland in 2006! These numbers are phenomenal so I'm going to try and tap in to what they've done to get women so involved and interested. Though I think there may be a saftey-in-numbers factor.
Race environment and other riders - I think this is a misconception held by people who haven't even been to races. Our aim is to get them along and challenge the misconception - I didn't know anyone when I started racing and now I probably know a good half of the 300 odd riders we get to our spring series races (5).
Not wanting to race... if we can up the numbers I think we could even convince these girls to give it a go.
On the up-side we wanted to know what women enjoyed about racing if they were doing it and found that it increased their motivation to ride (not to mention how much it can improve ability!), the chance of winning a spot prize (club races now offer spot prizes to all women who enter), beating the guys (YFY), socialising and getting to do different rides.
So we'll try and tap in to all of those factors to get more girls along. We have a small population but I know there are lots of women who enjoy riding.
The focus is on Wellington for now, but with luck in the coming years we may be able to get numbers up for nationals as well...
Any feedback/suggestions etc greatly appreciated