Women have been licensed amateur operators since the first years of federal licensing, and the record is much longer than the hobby's own reputation suggests.
Early operators
- Gladys Kathleen Parkin of California earned a commercial first-grade operator license as a
- Eunice Randall was announcing and working as an engineer at 1XE, the AMRAD station near
- Contemporary magazines and league rosters record women operating and building stations throughout
- Wartime demand for skilled operators and instructors drew many more women into radio work, some of
teenager in 1916, building much of her own equipment; she was widely written up in the radio press of the day.
Boston, by about 1920, at nineteen. She built her own amateur station, held the calls 1CDP and later W1MPP, and was among the first women in New England to hold a first-class license — an announcer, an engineer and a ham at once, in the year commercial broadcasting began.
the 1910s and 1920s, at a time when very little else in engineering was open to them.
whom stayed on the amateur bands afterward.
Organizing
The Young Ladies' Radio League (YLRL), founded in 1939, is the long-running international organization for licensed women operators. It runs its own contests and awards, publishes a newsletter, and offers scholarships. "YL" is the standard on-air abbreviation for a woman operator — "OM," old man, is the counterpart, and neither has anything to do with age.
Many national societies and clubs now run their own initiatives, and youth and school programs are where the numbers actually move. See youth and schools.
Where things stand
Women remain a small minority of licensees in most countries, and the gap is widest in the oldest age brackets — which says more about who was recruited in 1965 than about who is interested now. What demonstrably helps:
- Licensing classes and exam sessions that are not intimidating. A session run by strangers in a
- Visible operators. People join hobbies where they see people like themselves. Put your club's
- Youth programs. School clubs, scouting events like Jamboree on the Air, and STEM tie-ins reach
- Not tolerating bad behavior on the air. Clubs and net controls set the standard; casual harassment
basement recruits nobody; a session at a library or school with somebody to greet you does.
operators on the air and in the newsletter.
people before they have decided the hobby is not for them.
drives people off the bands and is also a rules problem — see operating etiquette.
If you are getting started
Nothing about the license, the exams or the equipment is gendered, and no one on the air can tell anything about you except your callsign and your signal. Start at getting started, and find a local club through NARA's club directory — clubs with an active youth or newcomer program are the easiest places to land.
Sources and further reading
- Distinguished Women: remembering the ladies of early radio
- Young Ladies' Radio League — the league's own history, contests and
- AC6V's amateur radio history — Rod Dinkins, AC6V (SK): a densely
— biographical sketches of the earliest women in broadcasting and amateur radio.
scholarships.
sourced year-by-year chronology of the service.