Megan Patrick of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has written an article about the new trend in female riders. Now, frankly I have no idea how wide the Post-Intelligencer’s distribution is, but the article is called, Biker Grrrls: Women are riding and racing bikes in growing numbers and its a pretty good read.

I found much of the article quite interesting, but one of the most fascinating parts of the piece is that Ms. Patrick states that the Motorcycle Industry Council claims that the number of women operating their own bikes has gone up from 6.4 percent to almost 10 percent since 1990. Percentage-wise that’s basically double Apple Computer’s marketshare in the CPU world - granted very different totals… And I have no idea if those numbers are accurate, but I do recall a time in the mid-eighties when MotorMilt had thought about getting into the motorcycle dealership game only to told by the factory that targetting women as potential owners was about the stupidest thing a cycle dealership could do. So here we are twenty years later and I’m left thinking why was it so hard to predict that women would eventually come out in mass to ride?

There’s nothing inherently ‘male’ about riding. I suppose that if you believe that American Chopper or The Great Biker Build Off series encapsulates all riders, you might get the mistaken impression that it’s an exclusively male dominated activity. Yet it seems to me that unlike so many other activities where gender is used as an arbitrary dividing line - motorcycles and motorcycle racing specifically - offer one of the few broad arenas were it truly doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman as long as you can flick back and forth across the seat of your bike. And it certainly seems that the more I surf the web, the more beginning or advanced female rider blogs I come across. You’d think at some point the major motorcycle manufactures would realize this and start to agressively target the female demo on a consistent basis, yet instead if you check out Cycle World or SportRider or any of the moto mags they’re not… Instead we get 2300cc Triumphs…

This isn’t the worlds most thought out early morning rant, but I guess what it boils down to for me is that I’d rather ride along side my significant other instead of riding with them 2-up.