OPINION
Forest of Dean Women’s take over day, June 2026 (Photo: Forestry England ©)
commercial opportunity currently sitting on the table. That sounds straightforward enough. In practice, however,
many organisations struggle to know where to begin. The cycling industry is full of people who recognise the opportunity. Ask most brand managers, editors, retailers or event organisers whether they would like to engage more women+ and the answer is usually an enthusiastic yes. But there’s a fear of getting it wrong, fear of being tokenistic, fear of alienating the strong male customer base, fear of doing things differently within the current challenges of budgetary cuts and industry squeeze. And there’s a genuine challenge in connecting with women+ when marketing teams are entirely made up of men. The result can be paralysis. Gearing Up! was developed to break that deadlock. Rather than presenting inclusion as a communications
exercise, a campaign or something to outsource to a PR agency, it treats it as a business opportunity that requires a structured, reflexive response. Importantly, it does not start with media content. It starts with women. The first gear is Strategy. This is where organisations establish the business case, not the moral case. Where are women+ customers currently being turned off or lost? What audience opportunities are being missed? If women represent 20% of riders but only 5% of your customers, what would closing that gap mean for your business? The strategy gear is also about establishing who owns the work internally and thinking about how success will be
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measured. Gearing Up! can’t be left to ‘the women’, or to one keen chap with a bit of an interest. It has to be an internal, strategic commitment. The second gear is Insight. Here, organisations move beyond assumptions about
women+ that have driven prior campaigns and start interrogating evidence. They examine audience behaviour, listen to women+ riders, identify blind spots and explore how stereotypes may still be shaping products, content and communications. The aim is to replace opinion with understanding and ensure decisions are grounded in data. [Understanding a bit of the history of women+ in cycling also helps ground organisations’ thinking and where women are coming from. Did you know that in the 19th century, (male) doctors responding to the moral panic associated with women riding bikes warned ferociously about ‘bicycle face’, an unpleasant malady associated only with women who pedalled bicycles]. The third gear is Operations. This is where the focus turns inward. It can be a bit uncomfortable putting the gender dynamics of your own organisation under the microscope, but it’s important to do. When diverse teams devise a marketing strategy, different voices are heard. In gear 3, organisations think about who makes decisions, whose voices are included and what processes are reinforcing the status quo or allowing diverse stories to emerge. Improving representation in marketing often starts long
before a campaign is created. It starts with the people shaping the work and the perspectives they bring to it.
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