Getting More Women On Bikes [The Atlantic]

Back when the bicycle was new, it was a symbol of liberation for women – part of the new range of opportunities that women pursued and embraced at the end of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th. Last year, writer Sue Macy published a marvelous book about that era,Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way). She includes a quote that appeared in an American magazine in 1896:

To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play.

To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world.

Unfortunately, in the United States of today, women are not riding that steed in numbers proportionate to their presence in the population. According to the most recent figures from the Alliance for Biking and Walking, only 24 percent of the bicycle trips in the country are made by women. In countries with better biking infrastructure and education, such as the Netherlands and Germany, women and men ride bikes in roughly equal numbers.

[continue reading at The Atlantic]