There is at least one young female on this forum as well you sexist buggers.
As for bikes I spotted in Vancouver during our protracted stay ... er evacuation ... last spring — the very cream of the crop was a gorgeous vintage machine in campy grupo and replete with drops that belonged to a young woman. I waited for her to come out of the market to congratulate her. She seemed delighted ... perhaps because someone actually understood what she was riding.
In my area too it's hilarious to see people trying to sell their rather crappy bikes for huge amounts of money, calling them rare... thing is there is not much market here and the bikes never sell, ....
BC is my home province. It has long been part of BC culture to think that your s**t is actually plated in gold. A Vancouver east-ender friend of mine said that a year ago you could snag boom bikes for just taking them away. He said now people were asking piles for the same things.
I visted the UBC campus, and there seemed to be more boom bikes grinding around there than in the boom days themselves. I stopped one young man to talk to him. He was riding a rather nice Raleigh that needed a bit of attention, but nice nevertheless. As I might have suspected, his Dad was cleaning out the basement, and out it came with the rubble. He himself thought that a lot of these campus bikes were coming to light as aging empty nesters were reorganizing their lives.
Perhaps the inheritors of these old bikes start seeing where a few dinners or some needed textbooks might come from. The notion of servicing them may not be of any interest compared to some badly needed cash.
That was very nearly my situation back in my student days. But, I had started out with a nice Raleigh Lenton at 10 y.o. (the first and
last the parents said firmly) and I understood the value of a bicycle. I knew how to service all of it except the SA hub. If I didn't do it, no one else was going to overhaul my hubs, patch my tubes etc.