I have a bunch of hobbies, which range from female dominated to a solid mix of participants. However, for a hobby that has a good number of both men and women involved, there seems to be a gap in the participation and achievement levels in a way that mostly alings with gender. A friend of mine mentioned we would have to look at how men engage with hobbies.
Do you feel that the ways men and women engage with hobbies generally, but especially when they share the same hobby still differs?
I’d say yes and no. There’s generally some difference with who’s doing woodturning in the basement or people who go to the old lady’s knitting club. Other than that, I’ve had a lot of hobbies where I didn’t spot any difference between how people approach it due to gender. Like a mixed sports club, or volunteer work for example in a youth organization. You’ll have different kinds of people there. But not due to gender.
There’s some hobbies where gender wouldn’t inherently matter but sexual dimorphism comes into play, obviously lots of strong capable women exist but there’s also lots of women like me who don’t pursue physical strength and it limits my participation in some hobbies I might have otherwise enjoyed. Like wood working for example, large projects requiring hand strength or heavy lifting etc would be something I would pass on even if I found it interesting
Yeah having to struggle to do something really dampens the joys of doing said hobby.
Fair enough. Sometimes I wonder, though. For example I see a fair share of women in the indoor climbing centre. And most of them have more hand strength than me, at least relative to body weight, because I’m sitting infront of the computer half of the day 😅 And it’s certainly less fun for me until I do sone more work-out. I guess luckily, most of the hobbies aren’t all about physical strength but come with quite a substantial element of skill as well, or dexterity or intelligence.