But for Men

 A meme that first popped up a couple years ago has seen a minor resurgence in the amateur radio community over the last week or so. The photo, which appears to have originated on AA4OO's Ham Radio - QRP blog, depicts a Ten-Tec Century 21 rig with an assortment of straight keys. A hand rests confidently on the navy-style nob of the rightmost key. In the meme, the photo has been captioned "CW - It's like FT8, but for men" [punctuation, not in the original, added for clarity]. While it's unclear who authored the caption, an educated guess would be that it wasn't the original photographer, who may or may not even be aware of how his image is being used.

Like all Internet memes¹, it would be easy—perhaps even desirable—to simply dismiss this one. Somebody finds a photo on the Internet and comes up with a caption designed to be just the right combination of clever and infuriating as to facilitate its spread. It's intended to push people's buttons; if you have a problem with that, perhaps you should try making your buttons a little harder to push. Lighten up, Francis. That's not always bad advice, but sometimes the fact that buttons are being pushed can reveal that we have things we need to talk about. 

And so we've been talking. We've been talking about how the automation inherent in digital modes software denies a ham's agency in completing a QSO. How the process becomes little more than a few mouse clicks, almost indistinguishable from sending a text message on a mobile phone. We've been talking about how CW purists are behaving like a bunch of pedantic snobs who are unwilling to accept anything other than a one-size-fits-all approach to amateur radio.

What we haven't been talking about is more subtle, and more insidious. It's subtle enough to carry its own plausible deniability. Surely no one meant it that way. And yet it's right there, with the potential to impose more of a drag on amateur radio's growth than any mode war ever could.

CW is like FT8, but for men. The implication is that CW is superior to FT8. It takes time to learn CW. It takes more skill to complete a QSO in CW. The operator is more engaged when sending and receiving CW. The linguistic shortcut for describing all of these desirable characteristics is to casually associate them with masculinity. There are traits that go into being a good ham, a solid operator, and anything short of that is—what, girly? The humor and cleverness of the meme rests on two assumptions: the assumption that FT8 is a mode for lazy and unskilled operators and the assumption that amateur radio is a dude thing. The second assumption is problematic if we amateurs are serious about growing this hobby and attracting more operators to have QSOs with.

The first assumption can be genuinely felt, or it can be in the context of sly irony or gentle needling, the way Ford and Chevy owners have for years gently needled each other over which is the better marque². The second assumption is too subtle to make the case for irony or good-natured fun; the only thing to fall back on is its plausible deniability. Nobody came right out and said that women aren't welcome in amateur radio. It's just a stupid meme. Lighten up, Francis.

At worst, this plausible deniability is disingenuous. With this plausible deniability, you get to have it both ways. You can make comments and post jokes that create an unwelcoming environment and, when called out on it, blame those who feel unwelcome for being so thin-skinned. At best, it's elevating the value of good intentions over the need to pay attention to results. That doesn't really fly either, and we all know it. We're technical people. A lot of us have engineering backgrounds. We understand the value of checking our assumptions about what's going to work against real-world results.

Whatever we're doing right now, it's not working in the real world. In the United States, a disappointing fifteen percent of radio amateurs are women. At the same time we wring our hands about this hobby's slow growth and complain bitterly about not being able to make QSOs outside of contest weekends, we're letting half the population sit on the sidelines. It might be time to try doing things differently. It might be time to stop describing—even in jest—the characteristics of a solid operator in terms of what real men do. Maybe it's time to drop the use of terms like OM, YL, and XYL³. I know, they're old telegraphers' abbreviations. Great. We use lots of old telegraphers' abbreviations. We can drop three of them in the interest of making our hobby more welcoming and inclusive and still pay plenty of respect to our communications heritage.

I had a music professor in college who would always say that music is something that cannot be had unless it is shared. The same can be said of amateur radio. Without other stations to engage in QSOs, it's just glorified antenna tuning. If growing this hobby is a goal, then we need to look beyond current demographics. The number of men over age 50 is limited. If we want this to be more than just an old man's activity, then we'll have to stop treating it as an old man's activity. That's not easy, and it might mean letting go of habits and traditions that we value. But the potential payoff is more active bands, more opportunities to make QSOs, and an easier time holding on to our frequency allocations. See you on the air.

1. The term meme originated with Richard Dawkins in 1976. His original meaning for the term was to describe a phenomenon of information replication that encompasses much more than cutesy captioned photos on the Internet. For further reading, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

2. It's Chevy. That's an easy one.

3. I'm a little suspect on 88 as well. If another operator sends me 88, I'll take it as a friendly greeting, but I certainly wouldn't send 88 just because the operator on the other end of the QSO is a woman. That seems creepy. A TU and a 73 is good enough for me.