...why do male cycle commuters outnumber females?

Question

I haven't been able to find any usable statistics but from my observation of cycle commuters men appear to out-number women by around 10:1

This is in a relatively bike friendly city, at least by North American standards (Vancouver Canada). In my office, a downtown mixed office building, there are no women commuters.

There are many more women cycling in road clubs at the weekend and lots of women committed to cycling groups and promoting cycling.

Is there any reason why women don't commute by bike and is there anything that can be done to boost the numbers?

(rephrased to make this a more useful question - rather than a friday afternoon thing)

Answer 1

Oddly the well publicised bike counts down here don't seem to be quite so free with their results.

I did a bit of counting back in 2001 and got about 20% female cyclists. Fewer on major roads, more on bike paths. 1300 cyclists over 3 months in a perimeter count (because the official stats only counted 5 major entry points). Interestingly despite the compulsory helmet law only 74% wore helmets (I didn't count "helmet on handlebars" as wearing a helmet).

In Melbourne there are stats here, the "cycling to work" and "cycling in Melbourne" pdfs. First graph shows approx 25% female, and in the outer suburbs mostly under 20 years old, with a broader peak in the inner suburbs (interestingly, fewer school age kids than the suburbs) and a second chart showing that as cycling percentage goes up so does the proportion of female cyclists - women are more likely to ride if a lot of men do.

Answer 2

Interestingly, Scientific American had an article about this a few years ago. According to the article, which cites a few studies, women are less comfortable with on-road biking than men, particularly in areas with auto traffic. As most roads are primarily for auto use, women tended to find routes which avoid these roads, making commuting a bit more difficult for them. The studies here in American show a 2:1 ratio of men to women cyclists.

“If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the detailed ‘bikeability indexes’—just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female,” says Jan Garrard, a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and author of several studies on biking and gender differences.

Women are considered an “indicator species” for bike-friendly cities for several reasons. First, studies across disciplines as disparate as criminology and child ­rearing have shown that women are more averse to risk than men. In the cycling arena, that risk aversion translates into increased demand for safe bike infrastructure as a prerequisite for riding. Women also do most of the child care and household shopping, which means these bike routes need to be organized around practical urban destinations to make a difference.

Answer 3

why are almost all cycle commuters male techies

Not just commuters but cyclists generally: more cyclists are male.

Source:

• http://www.cycling-inform.com/positioning-and-bike-fit/222-special-considerations-when-fitting-woman-to-bicycles-sensitive-issues-part-1
• http://www.cycling-inform.com/positioning-and-bike-fit/223-special-considerations-when-fitting-woman-to-bicycles-sensitive-issues-part-2

The above links blame bike fit, for one, saying that the typical bike is more fitted for a man.

Answer 4

Well I cycle in the Netherlands, I work in IT, I'm a techy and all my colleges are techies yet I am the only one who cycles, which is infuriating when living in a country built to be cycled.

Looking at the 13km trip into work there are a lot of commuters in the morning, (there are cycle jams at the lights) I would say the female/male split is 50/50. Even in winter I see just as many men as women.

Answer 5

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition did a survey of in their ara of why more women don't ride their bikes. Scroll towards the bottom to find a list of concerns tied to specific survey data. One of the reasons was that "37% of respondents did not agree that it was possible to transport children or groceries on a bike".

(edit: link dead, edit in article via archive.org)

Why Aren't Women on Wheels?

Survey says: "Cars!"

by Mary Brown

The number one reason that women don't ride bikes is... CARS! Not that cars are so much easier, but rather, women said they don't feel safe sharing the road with them. A full 80% of respondents didn't, according to our recently completed Low-Income Women and Bicycling Survey Project. Also, 63% said they would consider riding a bicycle if there were bike lanes in their neighborhood.

The survey found that only 12% of low-income women owned a car, yet 34% owned a bicycle! While 35% said the commute would be too far on a bicycle, more 65% actually lived within riding distance (10 miles or less roundtrip). It's interesting to note that although the 39-question survey was developed primarily to uncover low-income women's barriers to bicycling, it revealed more similarities with women of all incomes than differences.

We've always made some pretty random guesses as to why so few women biked, so with the support of a Women's Foundation grant and the help of David Binder Research we developed the first ever transportation research study focusing on women and bicycles. SFBC volunteers surveyed 416 random women for this field intercept survey with the goal of finding out why women ride bikes at far lower rates than men.

Bicycles are, potentially, an efficient and economical transportation choice for all people, regardless of class, race, income, and gender. However, the reality is that bicyclists on the streets of San Francisco are predominately white men in their 20s-40s. Approximately 4% of San Franciscans (about 30,000 people) commute to work and errands on bicycles, and of that number, less than 25% are women.

We want more women to utilize the bicycle as a convenient, cost-effective transportation choice and to discover how fun and easy it can be to bike. With the upcoming Bike Plan Update kick-off just a week away, we are in a prime position to advocate for the transportation needs of low income women. The results of this survey are now a base for our strategic planning and efforts to shape public policy.

The most exciting part about the survey results are similarities between respondents' top barriers to bicycling and the SFBC's own current programmatic goals and the myriad of opportunities this presents. We are actively working to create a bike network that would link all neighborhoods and commercial centers via protected space for bicycles, separate from most car traffic. Our goal of a combination of bike paths, bike lanes, and slow, traffic-calmed streets would help women overcome their fear of sharing the road with cars.

The SFBC recently applied for an additional grant from the Women's Foundation to develop a campaign to increase bicycle use among low-income women. One component of this campaign would be the development of an information booklet addressing the practical concerns of women about cycling. These booklets would be based directly on information gathered from the survey. Such as,

• where to buy low-cost bicycles (63% of respondents said they would consider riding if they had access to a free or low-cost bicycle);
• how to transport children or groceries on bikes (37% of respondents did not agree that it was possible to transport children or groceries on a bike),
• how to use the bike racks available on all regional buses (35% of respondents said they commute too far to work to use a bicycle);
• how to correctly lock a bike and avoid theft (62% of respondents stated their perception that bicycles frequently are stolen),
• where to find bike maps that show the best streets for bikes (66% of respondents said it was too hard to ride a bike due to the hills);
• how to avoid getting sweaty or dirty (38% believed they did not have the right clothing to ride a bike and 28% thought bicycling would make them too sweaty) ;
• what kinds of rain gear protect best for foul weather riding (34% though the weather is too unpredictable to ride in).
• The survey focused on the Mission, Bayview, and Western Addition neighborhoods. For some related data, a Gallup poll found that 53% of American wives do the grocery shopping, vs 16% of husbands, and 54% of wives care for children on a daily basis, vs 9% for husbands. So, women are more likely to be responsible for more cargo transportation, namely children and groceries.

What really made a difference for my wife was to buy an electric Yuba Mundo. We bought it online from Cycle 9 which is owned by two women and specializes in electric cargo bikes for transportation, and does a good job of online sales and support.

My wife is more likely to be the one who will be dropping off a child at daycare on the way to work, or going to the farmer's market to buy a load of groceries with at least one child.

With a regular bike, these things simply couldn't be accomplished with a reasonable amount of time, effort and sweat involved. I have a lot of annotated photos of our Electric Yuba Mundo on

Flickr, and have also written about it a number of posts on my blog.

Answer 6

I suspect there are a lot of factors. One factor I know from why my wife and her friends don't ride: It really hurts their crotches! Obviously, not every woman has this problem as I see lots of women riding bikes.

The other reasons I can only speculate: Gender roles demanding that women look more put together and this requires more infrastructure than is available at most work places. Obviously from looking at pictures from European cities, this can be overcome too, if it is even a real reason.

Answer 7

To add, based on mgb's comment. Portland has an active, politically involved cycling culture. The cycling culture drives many of the infrastructure improvements in this city. So it's bottom up rather than top down. Just because a city creates bike lanes, etc. doesn't mean that people will start riding bikes.

I think that a lot of it has to do with infrastructure in a given city. I live in Portland, Oregon, where our cycling infrastructure is good and getting better. There are many women on my commuting routes throughout the year. A lot has to do with bike lanes, bike boulevards, bike/walker paths transit accommodations, lane markings, and massive PR.

I can provide more info later, but a tidbit from Wikipedia.

Answer 8

To answer the most recently edited version of this question:

This is purely anecdotal, but a number of women have told me that they'd like to commute by bicycle but are uncomfortable doing so without a helmet and were also not willing to mess up their hair with a helmet.

Helmet debate aside, it seems that a PR campaign emphasizing that cycling is safer than driving would be a good place to start.

Answer 9

As a thumb suck, I'd say that the ratio for commuters (to work) is maybe 8:1 here in the Rochester MN area. In terms of recreational distance (longer than 1 mile, say) cyclists that you'd see out on a Saturday the ratio is probably 4:1.

Why no more female commuters? First off, quite a few stay-at-home moms here, so the worker ratio is probably around 2:1 overall. Beyond that, I suspect that women (in our culture) are less likely to think of/want to combine an athletic activity with commuting. And then there's the whole hair thing (which I suppose is code for the fact that women tend to need to dress up more for work, especially in a white-collar community). The major businesses in town do provide shower/locker areas, but only just adequate, and they're a rarity in the smaller businesses.

Commuting to the grocery, etc, is relatively low across the board, since the area is set up as an auto community, with only maybe three neighborhood groceries left, and major quadrants of the city with no grocery at all.

(I'll add that the Rochester area is exceedingly safe by most standards, so security is likely not a major factor.)

Answer 10

Speculation... Fear of breaking down. For most male cyclists, a flat or whatever is no tragedy; you just fix it. For women, who may not be as mechanically "ept", there is also the worry of being alone and isolated while doing the fix...

I commute from our cheap-parking garage to the station. It's only about a mile or so... I'm a police officer in full "bike" uniform, so I'm not worried about being harassed or even attacked during my 6 am ride. Not so with a lot of women, I would imagine. We see a lot of women riding alone during the day; fitness riders... No great fear on well-traveled roadways.