Abundant (some would say excess) information on equipment is found in dive magazines and on the Internet – and most of it is aimed at men. Struck by the inequities of just men evaluating equipment for magazine test reports and the inappropriateness of not much gear designed for women’s bodies, dive instructor Jennifer King decided to do something about the situation.
“I started diving in 1980 in cold water and had to tough out equipment issues – wetsuits and BCs that wouldn’t fit and all that,” she recalls. “When I took my instructor course, I was thrown I with the guys. We took turns being the student and the instructor. They think differently from us.”
King began campaigning for women’s voices to be heard in the dive industry, and in 1993 she spear-headed the Women’s Equipment Test Team (WETT) to evaluate equipment then on the market and to encourage the development of functional gear for women. The dive industry’s first response is what WETT calls the SAP Principle – Small and Pink. Companies would take a piece of low-end equipment, make it “small and pink,” and call it a woman’s model. Thanks to the efforts of King and the WETT, more quality, performance equipment sized for women is now available. “In the mid-1980’s, 20 percent of divers were women,” King says, “and now it’s 40 to 45 percent. We hope that the equipment issue is solved some of this.”
Reference:
(Walter, Claire. Gear Talk. Scuba Diving: Everything you need to know to get started (and keep going). United States: Ragged Mountain Press, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2000.)
Continued from Gear Talk
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