Originally Posted by antimonysarah

While people's anecdotes may include a lot of women, that often says more about the reporter. Either they've self-selected a group with a lot of women, or they're not counting systematically -- there have been a lot of studies with things like crowd scenes that at 30% women people (men and women) report gender parity, and at 50% they tend to say there are more women than men. It's because that's what we're used to seeing.

I take the bus a lot in downtown Boston, and I do idly count sometimes -- it's always between 1/4 and 1/3 women. Which is a good number, and a lot more than there were years ago, although there were so few bike commuters that it was hard to tell.

I'm not sure what the real demographics are, but there's a big gap. RUSA, the national long-distance cycling organization is IIRC 18% women, and the US basically beats every other country in the international federation it's part of with that figure -- some of them are like 1-5%. Strava is about 10% women, IIRC.

As for what to do -- that's a good question. Some of it is infrastructure-related, some of it is time-related -- women are more likely to be running to the store/dropping off kids on the way to/from work, and while you can do those things on a bike, it's less easy than a simple uncomplicated commute. Some of it is how performance-oriented a lot of cycling is and how that's presented -- for some reason, triathlon has been presented as woman-friendly whereas sporty cycling hasn't, so you have women coming into the sport side via triathlon. Some of it is making super-beginner-friendly shops that are not hostile to women who do not know about maintenance (and may have trouble developing the hand strength to do maintenance although likely can with time if helped to learn). There's a cultural expectation on boys to learn some amount of mechanical skill, there isn't on girls, and it can feel daunting to learn it as an adult.

Some of it is because no one likes to get screamed "b***h" at out car windows on a regular basis, or to get other harassment that is specific to being a woman on a bike rather than just a bike. (We get a lot of the just-a-bike harassment from drivers, but my husband has commented repeatedly on how much more he hears if we're riding together and I'm behind him (i.e. the first one cars spot).

The demographics help make it harder, too -- less choice in equipment (including used/inexpensive), fewer group rides at an appropriate pace (a average new, not especially in-shape woman is going to be a bit slower than her exactly-identically-average newbie not in shape male counterpart; there are always exceptions but the averages will mean women starting out are slower). And that makes riding in traffic aggressively harder, too -- it's easier when you can sprint up to 20mph in city traffic because that may be car speed.

Etc. It's not one reason, it's many. Reasons why women don't start; reasons why they stop. It's a lot like "why aren't there more women software engineers". Or maybe I just see the similarities (I am all three: woman, software engineer, cyclist.)