Dog Agility Demographics
18 Aug 2011
There was a question on the Clean Run email list asking why 13 of 15 US team members at the World Agility Open Championships were women. She asked is there a gender bias in the sport? Short answer is… yes. Just go to any US trial and you’ll see mostly women. Look at the US competitors at almost every world agility event and you’ll see mostly women.
Being the “Agility Nerd” I can actually bring some statistics to bear on this topic. I looked at my AgilityNerd Facebook page statistics on the ~2500 people who have “liked” AgilityNerd and it shows the following statistics for men and women grouped by age. Where women are the top bars going up and men are the lower bars going downward.
Granted readers of AgilityNerd are a small segment of the agility world, although a particularly thoughtful and intelligent one, and I don’t know if FB users are predominantly women - which would skew the results. But I think this graph is representative of the population of competitors I see at agility trials for both gender and age.
One thing I was just remarking to another male competitor at the USDAA NC Regionals was that there are more men in agility now than there were almost 15 years ago when I started learning agility. So you might be seeing a slight shift in this graph as time goes by.
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