Growing Women's Professional Cycling from the Ground Up

GROWING WOMEN’S PRO CYCLING FROM THE

GROUND UPArm yourself with the facts, the myths, and truths so you can

grow the sport!

RACHEL SCOTT @MISSBIKESALOT

• Cat 2 Road, Cat 1 Mountain, Bad Cyclocross racer, daily bicycle commuter

• First bike in 2003, started triathlon in 2007 and bike racing in 2008.

• Marketer by day for a software company. Previously in outdoor industry.

• Co-founded Naked Women’s Racing, sat on BoD for BRAC, co-organized Women’s Summit, and women’s mentoring programs.

NAKED WOMEN’S RACING A COLORADO WOMEN’S CYCLING PROJECT

• Co-founded team in 2010 with 3 women

• 2011 - 6 women primarily road

• 2012 - 20 women primarily road/track

• 2013 - 25 women racing, 30 on new club, still road

• 2014 - 50 racers, 60+ club members, all disciplines

WHY OUR MODEL IS DIFFERENT

• Focus on getting as many women as possible into the sport

• Support a charity to unite our team around

• Budget money for clinics for beginners to advanced riders

• Focus more on group rides

• Give money back to encourage race participation

WHAT ARE ISSUES PLAGUING CYCLING

• Disparities in Salaries (Cycling and women in general)?

• Lack of Media Coverage and Fans?

• Lack of Role Models?

• But there’s hope…and will show you why.

DISPARITIES IN CYCLING SALARIES IN ROAD

• The pro women's peloton is intelligent, well spoken, interesting, and unbelievably fit. Unfortunately, they're also almost completely invisible.

• Quoting from Velonews, for men the UCI mandates a minimum salary of $29,000 to $34,500 for Pro Continental riders and $33,000 to $41,500 for ProTeam riders, with an average ProTeam salary of $331,500.

• There's no such UCI minimum for women's racing. Many earning $6,000, and, as an unconfirmed but very believable estimate, up to a quarter of the peloton making nothing at all.

WHAT ABOUT CYCLOCROSS?

• Top Salary - 106,292 Euro

• Bottom Salary - 28,647 Euro

• Doesn’t include prize money but still is modest in comparison to other sports

WOMEN’S CYCLOCROSS SALARIES

• Top Salary - 20, 722 Euro

• Bottom Salary - 5,357 Euro

• ok, how about track?

TRACK RACING?

• Unless you’re at the top, top, top of the sport, good luck.

• Sarah Hammer, 9 time world champion isn’t living a life of the rich and famous.

MOUNTAIN BIKING?

• No minimum wage.

• Difficult to find info.

HOW ABOUT IN BUSINESS?• Startups with at least one

woman on their founding team are roughly 18 percent less likely to attract equity investors than their all-male counterparts, according to 2013 data from an ongoing survey by Emory University. Yet they are almost 20 percent more likely to have generated revenue.

• For venture-backed startups with five or more female executives, the report found 61 percent were successful and only 39 percent flopped, compared with a 50 percent failure rate overall.

• 7.6% difference between the salaries that women MBAs were getting and those that men were getting. A lot had been written on the comparable work issue already and much of the blame for the difference had been placed on organizations—basically institutional sexism.

• One of the questions she asked people is, “When you got your offer, did you attempt to negotiate?” She found that about 7% of women attempted to negotiate, while 57% of men did. Of those people who negotiated, they were able to increase their salary by over 7%. So, you can see that if women and men negotiated in similar proportions, that 7.6% difference would be cut dramatically.

• One of the things I ask my students is: If you think of a $100,000 salary, and one person negotiates and gets $107,000, and the other doesn’t—what’s the cost of that? In a simple-minded way, some people say, “Is $7,000 really worth risking my reputation over?” And I agree, $7,000 may not be worth your reputation.

• But that’s not the correct analysis, because that $7,000 is compounded. If you and your counterpart who negotiated are treated identically by the company—you are given the same raises and promotions—35 years later, you will have to work eight more years to be as wealthy as your counterpart at retirement. Now, the question is: $7,000 may not be worth the risk, but how about eight years of your life?

8 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE!

MEDIA COVERAGE• 96% of all television sports coverage focuses on men, according to a study

released by the Women's Sports Foundation.

• “We run stories online, and the numbers don’t lie. They don’t get the clicks. They don’t get the reads,” says Neal Rogers, the editor in chief of VeloNews, the leading U.S. cycling magazine.

• There are around 700 members of the Sports Journalists Association – 10% of those are women and only 5% of those are sports journalists.

• But for sponsorship to truly gel, the media is required. It doesn’t matter how many races you’re winning, how personable your athletes are or how incredible their stories are if nobody is writing about them. Cyclists across the board gripe about a lack of media coverage, but things are even tougher for women.

Do you read magazines that don’t have women’s coverage? What are you reading? What are you

watching? What are you tweeting?

ROLE MODELS?• Before you started cycling,

could you name a female professional rider?

• Any other cyclist other than Lance Armstrong? I couldn’t.

• Familiarize yourself with these women:

Alison Dunlap, Amy Dombroski, Maureen Manley, Katie Compton, Kristin Armstrong, Evelyn Stevens, Georgia Gould, Marianne Vos, Connie Carpenter, Alison Dunlap, Amber Neben, Laura Van Gilder, Marla Streb, Sue Haywood, Alison Powers, Coryn Rivera, Mara Abbott, Rushlee Buchanan, Rachel Heal, Anna Grace Christiansen, Carmen Small, Evelyn Stevens, Tayler Wile, Annie Ewart, Brianna Walle, Courteney Lowe, Anika Todd, Jasmin Glasser, Jo Kiesanowski , Kendall Ryan, Page Robertson, Sara Headley, Alison Tetrick, Amber Gaffney, Nicola Cranmer, Mari Holden, Fiona Strout, Gillian Carleton, Kate Chilcott, Korina Huizar, Liza Rachetto, Elle Anderson, Allison Beveridge, Annie Foreman-Mackey, Ariane Bonhomme, Catherine Desserault, Kinley Gibson, Stephanie Roorda, Olivia Dillon, Amber Neben, Amy Cutler, Anna Sanders, Erica Zaveta, Christina Gokey, Robin Farina, Heather Fischer, Sonya Looney, Pua Mata, Catharine Pendrel, Jeannie Longo, and the list goes on….

OR BECOME A ROLE MODEL YOURSELF!

WHY THERE’S HOPE

• What other sports have experienced this inequality and how did they fix it?

• Let’s look at Title IX

OTHER SPORTS?

• Marathons - Kathrine Switzer in 1967

• Tennis - Billy Jean King in the 70s

• Marie Marvingt? (Marveh)

FIRST WOMAN TO COMPLETE

TOUR DE FRANCE IN 1908

WHAT’S TITLE IX?

Title IX requires that schools (1) provide male and female students with equal opportunities to play sports, (2) give male and female athletes their fair shares of athletic scholarship dollars, and (3) provide equal benefits and services (such as facilities, coaching, and publicity) to male and female athletes overall.

RESULTS 40+ YEARS LATER?• Participation in elementary and secondary schools has skyrocketed since Title IX. In

1972, only 295,000 girls competed in high school sports, wheras 3.67 million boys did. By 2010-2011 the number of girls playing had risen to 3.2 million and the number of boys to 4.5 million.

• But schools still provide 1.3 million fewer chances for girls to play sports in high school and girls of color or different ethnicities have it even worse.

• In 1972, when fewer than 32,000 women played sports, women received only 2% of school’s athletics budgets and there were no athletic scholarships. Today, 193, 232 women compete, over 6x the pre-Title IX rate.

• But playing field still not level. More than half of students at NCAA schools are women, they receive only 44% of athletic participation opportunities.

MYTH BUSTERS• “Lack of depth in women's cycling – where 150 men lined up for

the Olympic road race in 2012, there were only 66 women on the start line.”

• “Even if we offer equal pay, women still don’t show up.”

• “Women aren’t capable of doing the same distances”

• “Bicycle riding isn’t popular among women” - Bicycle riding ranked #9 out of 47 popular sports for total female participation in 2011, surpassing yoga, tennis, and softball

TRUTHS• Women bicyclists were more likely than men to have a: Facebook

account (85% vs 64%), Twitter account (34% vs 24%), personal website (38% vs 20%)!

• In 2013, 13% of USA Cycling members were women and in Colorado, over the last two years, we’ve been able to grow to 17%. 5% difference than any other state.

• From 2003 to 2012, the number of women and girls participating in bicycling rose 20%, while dropping .5% among men and boys.

HOW CAN YOU

INFLUENCE CHANGE?

• Get a woman on a bicycle and show them the ropes! Join a team! Ride to work! Ride for fun!

• If you don’t have a female role model in the sport, get one or become one.

• Talk to someone who has more experience than you do.

• Be nice and celebrate each other’s strengths! You all were noobs at some point! It’s a scary sport so be supportive.

• Negotiate if not for yourself, your children, your family or your cat!

• Know your worth. Men can look at a sheet of paper with 2 things they can do and 10 things they can’t and still know they can rock out. Women look and see 10 things they can do and 2 they can’t and don’t even try.

• Fake it till you make it.

-Susan B. Anthony on the “freedom machine”

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and

self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel… the picture of free,

untrammeled womanhood."

-unknown

“If you want something that you’ve never had before, you’re going to have to do something that you’ve

never done before in order to get it.”

MORE READING• http://femgeniusesdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/knockout.pdf

• http://www.cxmagazine.com/takes-mens-womens-payouts-cross-questions-answers

• http://cdn-media.leanin.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Negotiationfinal3.15.pdf

• http://leanin.org/education/negotiation/

• http://viget.com/advance/conference-recap-startup-phenomenon-women

• http://www.newsweek.com/2014/05/16/female-entrepreneurs-fight-their-piece-pie-250065.html

• http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/xx-factor/Why-We-Ignore-Womens-Sports-20120717.html