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Photo Courtesy of the League of American Bicyclists
Women’s Bicycling SummitPanelist Veronica Davis, right, cofounder of Black Women Bike, chats with attendees after the first National Women Cycling Forum at the 2012 National Bike Summit.
Women’s Bicycling Summit
The energy was electric at the National Women Cycling Forum. Hosted in conjunction with the National Bike Summit, the first ever event drew more than 200 participants from across the nation. Participants were diverse in their pursuits and backgrounds, but united around one (huge!) goal: to increase the number of women who ride.
To provide insight and inspiration, the forum featured an impressive panel of female bicycle leaders from a range of different disciplines. But the event was an exchange, not a one-way road. It gave women a platform to have their voices and experiences heard on a national stage and provided a venue for female cyclists from coast to coast to make connections and share ideas with women they’d otherwise never meet. In just two hours, we felt the incredible potential for women to expand and increase bicycling in the United States. By getting together, face-to-face, we felt our collective power and our capacity to create change.
But we barely scratched the surface. On September 13, 2012, we’re continuing to build on that initial spark with a half-day National Women’s Bicycling Summit at the conclusion of the international Pro Walk/ Pro Bike conference in Long Beach, CA. The summit will provide a unique opportunity for everyday cyclists and bicycle professionals to network, share best practices and develop actionable steps to close the gender gap. It will feature targeted breakout sessions and facilitated discussions that will allow us to delve deeper into specific areas, such as media, engineering and diversity. It will showcase the successes of female leaders in our movement to increase female bike ridership with a keynote address and plenary discussion.
Most importantly, it will provide the space for us to put our heads together and create a bike future where women don’t account for just 24 percent of bike trips (like we did in 2009), but are equally represented on the streets and in the bicycle movement as a whole.
Learn more at bikeleague.org/conferences/women