I have been a shooter since late 1999 or early 2000, and you can see my 'joined' date for TFL off to the left.
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Can't remember when I became a moderator here, but it's been awhile.
In addition to the NSSF numbers (which you may be able to obtain via special request), you could check the numbers from Gallup. According to Gallup in 2005, 13 percent of all American women owned a gun. That number jumped to 23 percent in 2011. In hard numbers, that would translate to around 32 million women owning guns.
You could also check data specific to concealed carry permits. Not all states track that data or make it public, but some do. Florida has long published the percentage of carry permits issued to various demographic groups, including women, and I believe Texas makes their numbers public as well. In the past ten years, there's been a stark jump in the number of female permit holders.
Check the membership numbers of two nation-wide clubs for women who shoot: A Girl And A Gun Club, and The Well Armed Woman. The membership number rise in both clubs has been nothing short of meteoric since they came on the scene three or four years ago.
Finally, there's my own anecdotal evidence.
1) When I first began shooting handguns and taking defensive handgun classes, I was often the only woman in the class. Asking my mentors, Marty and Gila Hayes at the Firearms Academy of Seattle, about this, they told me that women made up roughly 10% of all their students, with much lower numbers in upper level classes. That was back in the early 2000s. Now in 2015, I'm one of four women on staff at FAS. In our entry-level classes, women comprise roughly 40% to 50% of each class, sometimes more. At the upper levels, the numbers begin to drop, down to the classic 10% in advanced classes. Given that the rise in female shooters is a relatively new phenomenon, this is about what I'd expect; there will be more women at the upper levels as new shooters come into their own and begin to learn more.
2) When I began traveling nationwide to teach classes under my own Cornered Cat LLC banner, one very well known firearms trainer sat down with me to talk about the training business. He told me that I would never be able to make a sustainable business teaching women-only classes for intermediate and advanced shooters because there just weren't that many women who would be serious about shooting. He also told me that nobody would ever respect me as a trainer if I kept teaching women-only classes, so he urged me to get away from that and focus on open enrollment classes.
In
his world, my advisor was right: his own business numbers showed that he'd consistently drawn only 3% to 5% women in nearly every class he'd ever taught. And it is notoriously hard to get women to the range for serious training using traditional training business advertising models.
But I'm still in business three years later, and the classes I teach -- which are either coed or women-only depending on the choice of my hosts in each location -- have been quite popular. To this I attribute one simple fact: I
don't look for my students via traditional means, by soliciting them from existing trainers and schools. Instead I reach out to the very enthusiastic women's shooting groups and clubs, which have been widely overlooked or disregarded by the serious-defensive-training world. In locations where the organizer relies on traditional ways to reach students, we don't do well. When we reach out to those groups, especially via social media outlets, and especially in places where the women leading the groups invite me to come, we do very well indeed.
As for respect? I'd like to think I earn it, every day I step on the range to do what I do. But I'm still aware it's an uphill battle. Few years back, at one location where I was teaching, the private club that hosted us assigned one of their board members to watch the class and -- the man carefully explained to me before we started the class -- expected that he would jump in to help me if it looked as though anything unsafe were happening or if it looked as if I needed a hand. Yup... that board assigned me a babysitter!
So it's safe to say that I've seen the lack of respect that women only classes tend to garner.
That's not the end of the story, though.
We got the class going, I did my thing and got the students shooting from holsters, working around cover, shooting at various distances and speeds, shooting while moving, and all the usual skills. That guy (who was a nice person, btw) watched us very closely at first, but by the time a couple of hours had gone past, he was just poking his head into the bay from time to time to see how we were making out. At the end of the weekend, he came up and shook my hand, saying some very complimentary things about my teaching. Then he added, with earnest sincerity, "I never saw a woman who could teach a serious shooting class before!"
Not telling you this to whine or to brag, but just to say this: I'm not the first, I'm not alone, and I'm not a freak. I'm a woman who enjoys shooting and enjoys working with other women who enjoy shooting. When I began learning to shoot, I studied under Gila Hayes at FAS. Gila is a strong and competent woman who's quite capable of teaching serious shooting classes. Vicki Farnam of DTI can hold her own among the best of the best in the training business, and has been doing so for many many years. Lynn Givens provides that same quality to her students.
So even though I'm hardly alone and hardly the first, it's safe to say that the numbers are rising. There are many other women shooting, learning, and teaching at local schools who are developing the same set of skills. I meet them every time I step up to teach a class.
pax,
Kathy Jackson
PS To add: we use a shared household account on Amazon, and although we buy a lot of stuff from there, it's
not where we buy gun related items. You'd never find me in that dataset!
