

A Gender Gap in Bicycle-Riding - kdr77
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jsvine/these-maps-show-a-massive-gender-gap-in-bicycle-riding

======
jsvine
Author here. Thanks for posting! HN might be interested in the related repos
we open-sourced today:

\- Data-processing scripts and HTML/JS/CSS for the maps and charts:
[https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/2014-06-bikeshare-gender-
map...](https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/2014-06-bikeshare-gender-maps)

\- Python parsers for the various bikeshare services' published data:
[https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/bikeshares](https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/bikeshares)

\- General guide to getting data from these services:
[https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/bikeshare-data-
sources](https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/bikeshare-data-sources)

~~~
dalek2point3
Thank you for generous well-positioned citations to OpenStreetMap -- the
community thanks you!

------
nailer
Men perform physically dangerous work far more frequently than women.

Riding a bike in a large city is dangerous - I've never done in it New York,
but in London altercations between bikes, pedestrians, taxis and buses are
quite frequent. There are few real continental-Europe-style bike lanes.

Perhaps same gender differences in appetite for risk also affects one's
decision to ride a bike in a large city?

~~~
pavement
Last summer, in NYC, I was in central park almost every weekend. After I
started counting, I counted like eight low-impact bicycle accidents involving
twenty-something girls before it started getting cold in September (it
averaged to nearly once a week). I'm going to estimate that prior to counting
it was about three or four (it had to be more than two), before it struck me
that it was getting repetitive. Once I started paying attention, I was kind of
surprised at how frequent and consistent it was. None of them drew blood or
broke bones or anything, but the ones that I noticed were usually accompanied
by a surprised yell, and enough to make people stop and check for concussions.
As far as I witnessed, I did not see any similar accidents involving males in
their 20's, or adult women of other age groups. On the other hand, lots of 40
and 50 something women are always out riding bikes with their kids and
husbands.

Bicycles in NYC are serious business though. I've known people who were
slapped with hundreds of dollars in violations _and_ summonses in one sitting.
I know one guy who was car-doored on a narrow street and woke up hospitalized
and missing teeth. I've also heard similar stories of males and females drunk
bicycling home at night that also ended in serious hospital visits.

More often than not, males in their 20's are on skateboards, and certainly
falling a lot, but usually with a degree of anticipation and a strategy for
absorbing and surviving the fall. Otherwise, males under 40 and not on
skateboards seem to be keenly aware of their own lack of athletic inclination
and poorly trained physical coordination (myself included; I like my teeth).

------
malandrew
Interestingly they don't mention helmets and hair as one possible contributor
of the gender gap in bicycle ridership (and motorcycles too).

Bicycling is an activity where you should be wearing a helmet for safety, and
this is at odds with styling your hair in the morning since that helmet with
mess up many styles of longer hair.

However, that being said, this data comes from city bikesharing services,
which often don't involve helmet usage.

I also wonder how much clothing choices impact ridership. Unisex clothing
choices (pants, shorts) are more convenient for bicycle riding than skirts and
dresses.

I'm curious, if you normalize the data to discount women who spend a lot of
time on their appearance (particularly their hair) and discount the percentage
of women who are not wearing unisex clothes, do the numbers more closely hit a
50-50 distribution.

Lastly, I'd love to see what data Google has on bicycle ridership for Google
Bikes on its Mountain View campus (relative to the ratio of men-to-women at
Google of course)

------
jgalt212
I, a male, don't bike for exercise because it's bad for the main vein. I
wonder how big the gap would be if this weren't the case.

