We had a vision for TCI that we have yet to realize. That’s ok. Things take time. This is no one’s full-time job. Those are also probably excuses. The vision included a lot more contributors, and very specifically a wider diversity of contributors. The bare fact though, is that we have not been able to keep any of our women writers for any real length of time. The content of the site is primarily created by middle-aged (this is charitable) white men.
Ask virtually any company in the industry who their core customer is, and they’ll tell you it’s middle-aged white guys. Sometimes the guys are younger. Everyone knows the paradigm needs to shift, but very few have figured out how. We haven’t either.
TCI has approached a dozen or more women to contribute and offered them more per contribution than we offer men, which hasn’t yielded results. In contrast, we don’t approach men to contribute. They approach us. Fairly often. Many don’t ask to be paid.
And this brings me to the larger point. It’s not a sob story about how our efforts at diversity have failed even though we’ve tried oh-so-hard. It’s a (tragically latent) realization that men often have something that women don’t, the time and the means to participate. Many of the women I’ve spoken to about contributing have evinced enthusiasm. Simultaneously, none of them seem to have the time.
No one is getting rich here. Though we offer women more, the amount of actual money trading hands is probably not enough to make it a very appealing prospect given the precious amount of “extra” time they have in their lives. Isn’t it true that our last available hour is also our most valuable.
We know that, by and large, women earn something like $0.75 on every dollar men make. To achieve their goals, either career or financial, women typically have to work harder and longer. So even though we are offering women more, it’s still not enough, and I understand that. It’s that last hour of free time we’re talking about.
Time is money. Money is time. It requires time and money to be able to ride bikes. It requires time and money to be able to write about it.
The inequities in cycling are partly a function of messaging from within the industry, but they’re also massively influenced by inequities in society at large, which values women’s time less than men’s time.
We have been naive in thinking that simply affording women opportunities to contribute would yield the result/progress we wanted. We have also been naive in thinking that the money we had to offer would somehow tip the balance in a positive direction. Naivete is its own sort of privilege.
What I’ve written here is about our experience recruiting and keeping female writers, but you can extend this reasoning to all of the other under-represented groups as well, and it all feeds back into the messaging that riding bikes is for white guys of a certain means.
This wasn’t our vision for TCI, but it’s where we are. Like any long ride, the only thing to do is to keep going, keep inviting people to the fun, keep trying to connect and to ride smarter if we can’t always just ride harder. And if you know someone…