For our first two years, about one member in eleven was a woman, and we told ourselves that was simply the market.
When we finally asked properly, forty two women answered and the reasons were consistent and had nothing to do with interest in training. The hours did not fit around school and work. There was nowhere to change or pray. The stairwell and the street could see in. And there was no woman to ask a question of, which several described as the main thing.
We took the third floor in 2018 and did the whole list rather than part of it: screened floor, separate entrance, changing room and prayer space, a full set of equipment rather than three treadmills, and two women trainers hired before it opened.
The hours were the other half. Six hours a day rather than one class a week, split morning and afternoon, because a woman who can only train at half past nine needs that slot to exist every day.
Forty three per cent of six hundred and forty members are women now, and the ladies classes are the fullest on the timetable. What we would tell anybody opening a gym here is that the demand was never the problem.
