Why Women in the US Don't Bike as Much as Men

Why Women Bike as Much as Men in Utrecht But Not Chicago

Walk out of Utrecht Centraal at rush hour and you’ll be hit by a river of bikes: parents with two kids up front, older riders with groceries, teens on beat-up city bikes. It’s very normal to notice that women are at least half that flow – often more.

In Chicago, you can absolutely find women on bikes. But if you stand by a downtown bike lane at rush hour, the pattern flips. The “typical” rider is a younger man, often dressed for battle with traffic. National data tell the same story: in the U.S., about 72% of bike commuters are men and only 28% are women. [1]

So why does Utrecht get gender parity (or even a “reverse” gender gap) while Chicago doesn’t?

Short answer: Utrecht builds a system where biking feels safe, convenient, and normal for everyone. Chicago mostly doesn’t. The gender split is a symptom of that.

What parity looks like in Utrecht

At this point Utrecht is almost a cliché in bike-world slideshows, but the numbers are still wild:

• Roughly half of all trips within Utrecht are made by bike – recent figures put the cycling mode share around 48–51%. [2]
• Nationwide in the Netherlands, women actually cycle more than men. Estimates put women at about 29–31% of all trips by bike vs ~26–27% for men; women make significantly more bike trips per year. [3]

Utrecht layers a bunch of mutually reinforcing choices to get there:

• A continuous, low-stress network: physically protected tracks along main roads, calm neighborhood streets, and dedicated “bike streets” where cars are “guests” at low speed. [4]
• Short, direct routes for daily life: the bike network actually connects homes, schools, shops, and transit hubs in straight lines, often more directly than car routes.
• Massive, visible bike parking: the station-area garage alone holds over 12,000 bikes, with more secure parking across the center. [2]
• All-ages design: you routinely see older women, parents with children, kids riding solo – not just sporty riders.

In that context, women don’t have to opt in to a risky or niche activity. Cycling is just… how people get around. So of course women’s cycling rates rise to match (or surpass) men’s.

What underrepresentation looks like in Chicago

Chicago has better bike infrastructure than it did a decade ago, but compared to Utrecht it’s still a patchwork – and the gender split shows it.

A few key stats:

• Nationally, women make up only about 28% of commuters who bike to work. [1]
• A detailed analysis of bike-share systems in Boston, New York, and Chicago found that women made only about one-quarter of all bike-share trips from 2014–2018. [5]
• Earlier Divvy analyses and industry summaries put women’s share of trips in Chicago’s system at roughly 25% or so, with some variation by time of day. [6]
• Traditional bike commuting remains a niche: mid-2010s Census numbers had Chicago’s bike-to-work share around 1.3–1.7% of commuters. [7]

On the ground, that plays out as:

• Fragmented protection – a few strong corridors, but lots of gaps, door-zone lanes, and fast multilane arterials with little or no protection.
• High-speed drivers as the default – even with posted limits, many major streets still feel like they’re set up for moving cars quickly, not for human-scale movement.
• Stress concentrated in exactly the trips women do most – school runs, grocery runs, cross-neighborhood trips on big roads.

When everyday trips require navigating heavy traffic, close passes, and hostile intersections, you get self-selection: people who are younger, more risk-tolerant, more confident in traffic (disproportionately men) show up in the bike counts. Everyone else, especially women, is systematically filtered out.

It’s not “interest” – it’s infrastructure and perceived safety

You still sometimes hear the lazy line that “women are just less interested in cycling.” The research disagrees.

Across countries, studies repeatedly find that women:

• Report higher safety concerns around traffic and driver behavior than men. [9]
• Prefer protected, low-stress routes far more strongly than men do. [8]
• Are more likely to bike when infrastructure feels comfortable and predictable, and less likely when it doesn’t. [10]

A U.S. systematic review of separated bike facilities found that protected lanes improve perceived safety and comfort for women even more than for men, and that female riders in particular associate those lanes with a sense of security. [8] In New York City, installing protected lanes led to disproportionately large increases in cycling by women on those streets. [8]

Zoom out globally and you see the same pattern: a UN analysis in 2024 noted that women are underrepresented on bikes in most countries, often by a factor of three to four, and linked that directly to unsafe roads, inadequate infrastructure, and the burden of care work and time poverty. [10]

In other words: when cities make biking feel safe and convenient, women ride. When they don’t, women disappear from the bike counts.

Trip-chaining and care work: where streets do (and don’t) go

Mobility research has long pointed out that men’s and women’s travel patterns differ:

• Men’s trips are more likely to be single-purpose commutes: home → work → home.
• Women’s trips more often involve “trip-chaining”: school drop-off, then work, then a stop at the store, then caregiving or errands before returning home. [13]

The Dutch system quietly bakes those patterns into the street network:

• School streets and bikeable school catchments make it easy to bring kids by bike.
• Dense, mixed-use neighborhoods put groceries, pharmacies, and services on the way, not across a hostile strode.
• Continuous low-stress routes let you string those stops together without rerouting through scary intersections.

Chicago, like many North American cities, is still shaped by arterial roads, segregated land uses, and large parking lots. The result:

• The short, local trips women handle more often are exactly the ones most exposed to traffic danger.
• If you have kids or groceries with you, the penalty for any scary situation is higher – you can’t just hop between lanes the way a solo courier can.

When the network only really works for direct commuter trips and doesn’t work for chained care trips, you’ve effectively designed women out of cycling.

Culture, harassment, and the “this isn’t for you” signal

Even with perfect bike lanes, culture still matters – and here too, women get the worse deal.

Recent surveys in the UK highlight that intimidating driver behavior and harassment are significantly bigger barriers for women than for men; more than half of women surveyed said safety fears and lack of suitable infrastructure limit their cycling. [12] Another piece on indoor vs outdoor cycling found that while women are overrepresented in spin classes and platforms like Zwift, they remain underrepresented outside, citing harassment, road aggression, lack of representation, and time constraints from caregiving. [13]

Chicago is not unique here. In many car-dominated cities:

• Street culture around cycling is still coded as sporty, male, and gear-heavy.
• Women who bike report more frequent catcalling, harassment, and “get off the road” style hostility.
• Infrastructure gaps combine with social cues to broadcast: this space is not really built for you.

Utrecht doesn’t magically eliminate bad behavior, but by saturating the city with normal, everyday cyclists of all genders and ages, it flips the script. Cycling doesn’t mark you as part of a niche subculture; it marks you as a normal resident using a normal tool. That normality softens the gendered “this isn’t for you” message.

What it would take for Chicago to look more like Utrecht

If Utrecht shows that gender parity on bikes is possible, what would it mean for a city like Chicago?

At a high level, the recipe is not mysterious:

1. Build a citywide, low-stress network – not one-off projects. Continuous “8-to-80” routes that let you ride from any neighborhood to any other without being forced onto high-speed arterials.

2. Design around care trips, not just commutes. Protected routes to schools, daycares, grocery stores, clinics, and parks – and traffic-calmed local streets that make drop-offs by bike easy.

3. Tame driver behavior. Lower default speed limits, serious enforcement against close passes and dangerous driving, and street design that physically discourages speeding.

4. Invest in lighting, visibility, and secure parking. Many women’s trips happen early in the morning or after dark; feeling safe around the bike lane matters as much as the lane itself.

5. Elevate representation and women-led programs. Women-led ride groups, learn-to-ride classes, and targeted campaigns have all been shown to help chip away at the gender gap when they’re backed by real infrastructure. [11]

In the meantime, in places like Chicago, individual riders often lean on personal safety gear – bright lights, mirrors, hi-vis clothing, and loud horns that can cut through traffic noise – as a kind of “last line of defense” on streets that are still fundamentally car-first. Products like Loud Bicycle’s car-horn-loud bike horns are part of that personal toolkit. In fact, our sales data underscores the difference in infrastructure: we ship thousands of horns to Chicago, London, and cities across Spain and Germany where riders fight for space. In Utrecht? We have sold zero. The long-term goal is a city where fewer people feel they need emergency tools just to run an errand.

The gender split is a system metric

The contrast between Utrecht and Chicago is not about Dutch women being braver or more “into bikes” than American women. It’s about what happens when a city decides that cycling is supposed to work for everyone – and then builds the network, land use, and culture to match.

If you want a simple metric for whether a city’s bike system is truly working, you don’t need to dig too deep into the spreadsheets. Just stand by a busy bike route at school-run time and ask:

How many of these riders are women, and how many are kids?

In Utrecht, the answer already looks like the population. In most U.S. cities, including Chicago, that’s still the gap to close.

References

1. US Gender Gap: Kate Hosford & Meghan Winters, “Quantifying the Bicycle Share Gender Gap,” Findings (2019); Better Bike Share Partnership, “Achieving Gender Parity in Bike Share” (2022), summarizing ACS data.
2. Utrecht Share: “Netherlands further builds on cycling’s modal share, hitting 51% in Utrecht,” CyclingIndustry.news; Utrecht city profile and cycling section on Wikipedia.
3. Women Cycling in the Netherlands: “Women Cycling in the Netherlands: Key Statistics & Trends,” Hammer Nutrition EU (2024).
4. Dutch Design: “The Dutch Approach to Bicycle Mobility,” FHWA international scan; PeopleForBikes “Lessons From Europe” profile of Utrecht’s cycling network.
5. Share Systems: Hosford & Winters (2019), analysis of bike-share trip data in Boston, New York, and Chicago.
6. Divvy: Steadyrack, “Bike share programs are on the rise, yet the gender gap persists”; Streetsblog Chicago coverage of Divvy’s gender split.
7. Chicago Mode Share: U.S. Census Bureau press release “Census Bureau Reports 1.3 percent of Workers Commute by Bike in Chicago” (2014); Streetsblog Chicago coverage.
8. Protected Lanes: Rachel Aldred et al., “Cycling provision separated from motor traffic: a systematic review,” Transport Reviews (2016); Streetsblog NYC, “More Protected Bike Lanes = More Women Cyclists” (2022).
9. Graystone: M. Graystone et al., “Gendered perceptions of cycling safety and on-street cycling infrastructure,” Journal of Transport & Health (2022).
10. UNRIC: “Addressing the gender gap in cycling,” UN Regional Information Centre (UNRIC), 2024.
11. Women Bike: League of American Bicyclists, Women on a Roll report (2013).
12. Guardian: “Women put off cycling by safety fears and intimidating drivers – study,” The Guardian (2025).
13. Indoor: “‘Underrepresentation breeds underrepresentation’: Why are so many women cycling in the gym, but not outside?” Cycling Weekly (2025).
14. Care Work: Campfire Cycling, “Why Aren’t More US Women Riding Bikes?” (2014).