After this year’s first women’s cycling forum, bike advocates have finally (if belatedly) begun to tap into the powerhouse that is roughly 50% of our population: women.

With the tremendous outpouring of support and energy that came out of the women’s cycling forum held at this year’s National Bike Summit, women will be able “to network, share best practices and develop action steps to close the gender gap in American bicycling” at the first Women’s Bicycling Summit.

Organized by the national bike advocacy group, the League of American Bicyclists, the first Women’s Bicycling Summit will feature Leah Missbach Day as the keynote speaker where she intends to speak about

how the bicycle can inspire both personal and cultural revolutions. Day will set the stage for an event aimed at increasing the number of women who ride bikes and empowering female leadership at all levels of the bicycle movement.

The Summit will be held in Long Beach on September 13th and features some outstanding speakers including:

• Dotsie Bausch, Olympic track cyclist
• Elly Blue, writer/speaker, Taking the Lane
• Yolanda Davis-Overstreet, Ride in Living Color
• Emily Finch, Car-free mother of six
• Kristin Gavin, founder, Gearing Up
• Mia Kohout, publisher, Momentum magazine
• Allison Mannos, co-founder, Multicultural Communities for Mobility
• Ovarian Psychos women’s bike brigade
• Staff and youth leaders from Recycle-A-Bicycle
• and many others…

Registration is $35 and you can purchase your tickets at the League’s website. Scholarships are available for women with financial need: For more information, contact Carolyn Szczepanski at carolyn@bikeleague.org.

Organizers state that the Summit “will be a powerful opportunity to learn from each other, build a network of female leaders from coast to coast, and work toward a bike future where women don’t account for just 24 percent of bike trips, but are equally represented on the streets and in the movement.”

The Women’s Summit will also include the “Cycle Chic: Past, Present & Future” urban bike fashion show, hosted by Women On Bikes SoCal and inspired by the visuals and aesthetics often featured on  Copenhagenize.com by proprietor and photographer Mikael Colville-Andersen who was invited to be a special guest at the show.

I for one, am looking forward to the Summit. The bike advocacy universe is almost exclusively white and male- two things I’m most certainly not.  The existing advocates, by and large, are most certainly welcoming and supportive, but if this movement has any aspirations of moving forward to reach a wider audience and truly work on transforming our transportation network, we must cultivate and foster the experiences that will bring us closer and closer to true gender parity. Women only environments serve as an excellent starting point to allow the next generation of women leaders to truly blossom. Through my work here and elsewhere as a bike advocate, I’ve had the incredible opportunity to meet with other enthusiastic, energetic women who are all advocates in their own right. It is about time they have an opportunity to blossom into the sort of leaders they are destined to be and I thank the organizers for putting this event on.

Update: Per Timur’s question below, men are welcome to attend the women’s bicycling summit. Thank you to Carolyn Szczepanski, Director of Communications at the League of American Bicyclist, for clarifying.