women's basketball at Oracle

I've joined the women's league at the Oracle Gym again. I'm a little surprised and a little annoyed that we can't get 24 women to sign up this year.

My first thought is that there are just way more guys than girls at Oracle, but this logic doesn't stand up to closer inspection. Let's do the numbers...

The men's 5-on-5 league has 3 tiers (recreational, intermediate, and competitive), each with about 10 teams, with at least 6 players on a team...that works out to over 180 players (probably closer to 200). Did I mention there's also a 4-on-4 men's 6ft-and-over league, a 4-on-4 men's 6ft-and-under league, a 4-on-4 coed league (primarily comprised of men) and at least one 3-on-3 men's league? Granted lots of guys play multiple leagues, but I'm still going to guess that there are at least 500-600 men that play basketball on a regular basis at Oracle, especially if we count all the guys who are too intimidated to play in a league. Of course all the good players show up for lunch pickup games too, so the regular guys have to shoot around at like 2 in the afternoon.

Okay, let's get to percentages. There are about 8,000 employees at Oracle headquarters. Probably 80% of them are men (giving us 6,400 men), so we're looking something on the order of 10% of the men at Oracle playing basketball, even if we assume some of the league players aren't Oracle employees. Let's say conservatively that 6-10% of the men play basketball.

Using our 20% women number, there are at least 1,600 women who can play eight weeks of league ball for $15, and have chosen not to, despite two months of advance notice. Of the 20 people that have signed up, I know of at least 4 (including yours truly) who don't even work at Oracle. So that's 16 women out of 1,600, or 1%. Granted, there are some women who play only in the coed or men's leagues, but I'm going to guesstimate that number at about two or three. It's also possible that some women don't feel that they're good enough to play in the league, but given the level we play at, and the fact that six of us started playing in the league last year with no prior experience whatsoever, that barrier should be fairly low. So optimistically, slightly more than 1% of the women play basketball.

So our conclusion is that proportionally, somewhere between 5 and 10 times more men than women play basketball at Oracle. No wonder the guys always crowd around, they're used to us giving up the court because we don't have enough women to hold it.

So, tonight we're having a scrimmage, in an effort to recruit more people. I'm cautiously optimistic.