My wife's a fair weather commuter. She'll be the first to admit that just getting in the habit of riding every day is her biggest challenge but that has nothing to do with gender. Once she gets going on a routine she'll happily ride rain or shine but not in snow/ice.
Next for her is, I hate to say it but she has: her hair and clothes. Regarding her hair, she leaves a hair dryer at work and redoes her hair when she gets to her office after her 8 mile ride.
Clothing- she leaves some very pro clothes in her office for when need be but her job allows her to be casual so she wears cycling shorts/tights under some really cool, funky looking skirts. She also has this whole method worked out of tucking them into what I could only call I kind of "culotte" for the ride in and then unwinds it, removes the cycling shorts/tights and off she goes. I've seen her do her transition from "bike rider girl" to "head of a program at a prestigious university" in about 3 minutes. She makes a far better transition than I do. I tend to look like I just got blown in off a mountain top all day long.
Next for her is the fear factor. She doesn't like traffic. Fortunately, we moved to within a mile of a bike path that practically drops her at the door of her building. So she has 1 mile of residential back roads and one busy cross street to the bike path. Sometimes she has to cross town to another location and she definitely gets stressed about that. Sometimes when she's pressed for time she'll take the streets route home because it's two miles shorter. In the last three years that has become bike laned almost the whole way and she's thrilled with that.
Next is mechanical/fear- she's afraid of mechanical breakdowns. I do the maintenance on her bike. I was a full time bike mechanic for many years and I enjoy working on bikes and she really doesn't. I've given her lessons on fixing flats several times, I've sat with her as she changed a tube several times but, fortunately, she's had very few breakdowns and hasn't had the practice to feel fully confident even after years of riding. What I've done now is recorded the process of changing her rear tire on video and loaded it onto her smart phone. It's done in real time with words of encouragement that she'll be done and on her way in a couple of minutes.
Once she gets riding regularly she invariably drops whatever extra pounds she might have added on during her interim off the bike and she gets totally psyched about biking and becomes a very vocal proponent.
She also bikes for recreation but prefers bike paths to road riding. We live out in the middle of a huge state forest for much of the summer and she does remote dirt road riding on her mountain bike, often alone . She has some fears of "weirdos" and carries bear repellant. The other day I rode with her and a huge black bear leapt out of a tree that hung over the dirt road and ran off into the woods. Shortly after that we found a huge mound of what, dare I say it, looked like mountain lion scat in the middle of the road. She's seen the bears several times on her own but the idea of a mountain lion freaked both of us out. I don't think she'll be dissuaded from riding alone but she'll definitely be more alert- but so will I.
