We have had an excellent response to date for new team members, with 21 enquiries, resulting in 10 confirmations so far to attend our two part ” Introduction to Team Membership ” sessions, on Thursday evening 15th February and all day Sunday 18th February. (Our next such intake is likely to be in august 2007)

From this we will be in a position to select from those who have applied to join, a number of appropriately experienced applicants to join the team as Probationery Team Members, who may then go on to become Trainee Team Members.
Now heres the puzzle, from everybody who has applied so far we have not had a single female applicant, it’s not that we are a male exclusive organisation, currently we have 5 women members in our total 36 strong team call out membership, with 7 out of 8 of our Support Group members being women.
Our Team Leader joint with our Training Officer comment that in an average year the team receives about 50 applications of interest in joining the team (most get little further than this stage in reality) but for every 20 applications from men there tends only to be 1 application from women.

There are many women suitably experienced in the outdoors to meet our membership criteria, indeed out and about in our team area we see many women Mountain bikers, climbers and hill walkers, yet applications to join are almost non existant.

This situation is reflected on a national basis, with many women in UK MRTS yet their number is very small compared to their male colleagues.

So in a direct appeal to any women interested in joining the Bolton MRT as Call Out List member, come along and give it a go, there is nothing in the team that precludes women taking a full and active part in everything we do, and more women in the team would better reflect the society we operate in as a whole.

Full details on how to join the team are available in the ’membership’ area of the website, but hurry because our next intake is only a few weeks away.