Posts about Gender

The Netherlands' Neal said that encouraging women to cycle starts with safety: "If bicycling is safe, people will get on their bike." She reminded the crowd that her country hasn't always been the pinnacle of bike mobility. In fact, the Netherlands was once as car-oriented as the US is today. Only after the oil crisis hit in the 1970s did the country change policies to make bicycle travel a top priority.

Veronica Davis, a Greater Greater Washington contributor, said a "Complete Streets" policy encourages planning for all modes of travel and travelers of all abilities. Next month, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments expects to issue a Complete Streets template local jurisdictions can use to develop their own policies.

"Women-only groups are critical to generating momentum for women" said Davis, who co-founded Black Women Bike, a DC-based women's cycling group that has grown phenomenally in less than a year. Women are often more "communal" than men, so groups such as Black Women Bike, or Birmingham, Alabama-based Magic City Cycle Chix can encourage and attract women to talk about and ride bikes.

In this video, Davis talks about why she started Black Women Bike, and what the group does:

Speakers said the bicycle industry needs to focus less on "mamils," or "middle-aged men in lycra." Advertisers should depict more women, more bikes need to be designed to female tastes, and bike shops should cater more to women's needs. One panelist said shops could start by "keeping the bathrooms cleaner."

"To get women to bike, you can't operate in a vacuum," added Davis, saying women need to be involved in advocacy, planning, and government offices from public health to land use planning. Says Davis: "You don't have people biking to school because half the time schools are all the way across the city." Panelists noted that more girls are also needed in engineering, pointing to Fionnuala Quinn, a local DC bike advocate and engineer who helped plan the forum.

The Forum's sendoff message was simple: the state of bicycling as a transportation mode depends on getting more women on two wheels. In order to get people to take bike transportation seriously, it's important for everyone, women included, to "bike as much as possible."

The graphic breaks down the cycling rate between men and women. Tanya Snyder wrote,

The male-female ratio is no trivial factoid. Women are considered an "indicator species" for cycling. When the conditions are right, female cyclists multiply. When urban biking feels like a game of Pole Position, the ladies tend to find other modes.

DC comes out well on gender equality. It has the 8th highest rate of bike commuting overall, but is 3rd best in the percentage of bike commuters who are women, with 38%, just barely edging out Boston. Minneapolis is the most equal, with 45.4% of its bike commuters women, and Portland, the #1 city for biking overall, is second with 39.1%.

What else affects women's comfort level riding? Chicago cyclist Dottie wrote about her experience with the "Mary Poppins Effect." Basically, drivers seem to be more deferential to people riding bikes if they're women, riding upright, and wearing street clothes.

Dottie also observed that an important element for getting this deference is either not wearing a helmet or wearing a brightly colored feminine-looking helmet with hearts or flowers. Most fascinatingly, her experience is that one of the biggest factors is whether the rider is wearing a skirt:

Typically I wear a dress or skirt, but today I wore a navy pinstripe pantsuit with a ankle strap on my left leg. Everything else was the same: I rode an upright Danish bike, wore a helmet covered with red hearts and rode with my typical calm assertiveness, but luxury SUV after luxury SUV after car passed me too closely. The effect was decidedly non-Mary Poppins.

This would be a great topic for a more scientific study. Meanwhile, it would be best if drivers treated all cyclists with respect and care, both men and women, regardless of how much leg is visible.

If you're a woman who bikes, have you noticed more deference from drivers at some times versus others? What are the biggest obstacles to more women (and men) feeling comfortable biking?