Bike-Share Is Key to Closing the Cycling Gender Gap

Do a lot of women ride bicycles in your city? If so, you’ve probably got a healthy bicycling culture where people in general feel safe getting on the bike to ride for transportation and recreation.

The importance of women as an "indicator species" for biking has been known for years. But the United States doesn’t look so great when it comes to this particular statistic. Only 24 percent of bike trip were made by women in the U.S. in 2009, compared with 55 percent in the Netherlands and 49 percent in Germany.