There are too many of them to put on a poster or on the side of a milk carton. And it’s not that they were taken, or that they ran away, it’s that they never existed. And yet, still we feel their absence keenly.
Look anywhere in recorded history and you will find the names of men, read about their groundbreaking work and ideas. Where are the women?
It is manifestly not the case that men are smarter than women, right? Where are the female physicists? There are a few of them, sure, scattered here and there, making themselves known despite myriad systems forbidding them access, counter examples to make the point. Where are the women prime ministers? That you can name one does not answer the question.
Ask any bike company who their customers are, and even the most aggressively progressive will tell you it’s 70% men. From the top down, cycling is built for men. It encourages men. It cultivates men. The obstacles for women might be fewer today, but they remain.
And don’t misunderstand me. I don’t occupy any moral higher ground here. This isn’t about scolding or shaming, or even laying out a road map to achieve a goal. There are a hundred reasons cycling is like this and none of them are good. Culture takes a long time to develop and can take a long time to change.
This is sadness.
The bike has given me so much, and I hate to think others have been denied the opportunity to feel the freedom, joy, inspiration and confidence that riding bikes offers.
When I read physics or history now, I wonder where the women were. For every Einstein, we are missing one genius. For every Roosevelt, we are missing one leader. The ratio is 1:1. And for every dude I see riding a bike, I know there is another rider missing. How many? Not just in my town, or in this country, but in the world, and back through history.
Where are they? What would they have done? How much more incredible might riding bikes have been if every one of them had been able to, had been encouraged to ride?
When I first got into geosciences, women faculty, at least on tenure track, were rare. Just looked at my old department at the U of Hawaii. Quite a bit better. 14 guys, 8 women.
DEI in Cycling
An attempt to ignite a discussion.
Is giving women free entries to events fair to the men who paid full fee?
Is having equal payouts when the women’s field is less than half of the men’s field fair?
Is the DEI issue really just a racing\event issue? Check out bike paths in urban areas and there is a great deal of gender equity and diversity.
Unbound had great success with an elite women’s only start-should that idea be more widespread for events? Segregation that has a positive impact.
Women seem to be touring\bike packing in fair numbers. Wonder what companies like Backroads, VBT and Trek Travel see as gender splits for their package tours.
As a cycling event promoter, centuries for our local club, one of the most common questions I got from women thinking about signing up was “are there bathrooms on the route.” Does cycling have a peeing problem that’s bigger than we are willing to talk about? Would porta-potties every 20 miles be a selling point for an event to encourage more women to think about entering?
I think possibly these conversations might be flippable, in the sense that, we normally come at the from a sense of fairness. What’s fair? What’s equal? And that’s an easy conversation to have. I don’t know anyone who thinks fewer women should be riding bikes (although maybe I just don’t know the wrong people). Instead, maybe we could just talk about inclusion from a business perspective. What would it be worth, in dollars, to all the manufacturers and promoters if there were as many women as men involved in the sport. It would make the sales delta at the beginning of the pandemic look like a bump on a log.
It’s all well and good to appeal to people’s better natures, but the arc of change is slow and subtle. If we invoke the simple greed of having more customers, perhaps we get the social and societal change we want without needing people to take sides in some culture war, which is what everything feels like anymore.
Separate from the practical side of this question, I really did just want to express some sadness for all the lost joy that our male-dominated cycling paradigm has denied to so many people, femme and otherwise.