Oxford can more than easily field all-female teams, and did so as one of our three at last year's NAQT IFT. They came second (to another Oxford team) so I guess there was no problem. Similarly, we won the British Championships with a 3/4 female team. Anyway, the reason I'm adding this is to give a bit of encouragement to the teams saying they have a gender imbalance problem - don't panic! Until this time last year, so did we. Precisely one female player had turned out for the Oxford first team _ever_. We only had about two girls around to speak of. Then we get our new intake this year, and gain a whole batch of top notch female players. The only active thing we'd done to encourage this was to make sure that we were friendly and welcoming to anyone of any gender wanting to play. So if you have more Y chromosomes around that you can use, don't panic or go overboard trying to recruit women to your team, as people can smell desperation miles away. Just be friendly to anyone new, and the imbalance will sort itself out, as much as it ever can, in the end. But I guess you won't believe me until it does :) Rob (who has spent the last year fruitlessly trying to overcome the apparent barrier here between quizzing and what we quaintly call "ethnic minorities" (what a horrid expression!), but that's another story).
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