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The Lesser Spotted Female Biker

The Lesser Spotted Female Biker

After I passed my DAS, I bought my first big bike via Ebay (yes I know, think of me as a cautionary tale on how not to do things) and took the train a couple of hundred miles up to Nottingham to collect it. The seller had arranged to meet me at the station in his car, and in our email ping-pong prior to the event, we established that I would stand at the front of the station and he would come and find me, as I was going to be fairly distinctive in head-to-toe leathers and carrying a bike helmet.

I duly stood at the front of the station waiting for my lift to arrive... and waited... and waited... as the car park slowly emptied out and all of my fellow train passengers drifted off. Just as I was starting to think that something had gone wrong and the seller wasn’t going to turn up, a guy who had been sitting in the car park looking straight through me for about ten minutes finally climbed out of his car and wandered over to me.

“x-y-z?” (My Ebay I.D) he asked sceptically. “Yes!” Said I, rather confused as to why it had taken him so long to come and get me, when he’d basically been looking right at me for ten minutes or more. All became clear when he dropped his next comment, “Oh sorry, I thought you were going to be a bloke.”

That one sentence sums up a hell of a lot of my experience of the biking world; Women bikers, significant numbers of us though there are, are still considered in some people’s eyes to be something of an oddity.

It didn’t really occur to me that biking was a fairly male-dominated arena when I first started out as a learner. Certainly in the last ten or so years since I first got let loose on the roads, female bikers have become less of a rarity. We can now, finally, find a good selection of biking clothing and accessories in most bike shops and online retailers, although I do still despair of being able to buy a reasonably nice pair of waterproof boots in a size six that aren’t as wide as they are long.

However, twice within the last year alone I have been standing by my bike at a bike park or out and about, faffing around with the top box or the keys or something, only to have someone ask me “Is that your boyfriend’s bike?” Honestly, I’m not quite sure how this mental blockage or logical disconnect seems to happen for some people; we can put a woman in space, and yet the idea of a girl getting onto a bike without a bloke to do the driving seems to be almost beyond the limits of credulity for some!

Much as I might sound as if I have a bee in my bonnet about the whole thing, honestly I generally just find it funny.

What I do, however, have a bee in my bonnet about is the way that a small number of bike garages will treat female bikers; As if we’re all freaking idiots. I know that this phenomenon is not unique to the biking world, and happens just as often with cars; and I also know that it is not totally unique to women either, and that some mechanics seem to view it as a matter of personal pride to be able to fleece the unwary at every given opportunity, but I have still found that several bike garages I have used have tried to have me over or con me into buying something that I really didn’t need, just because I don’t pee standing up.

The dubious winner of the ‘most likely to earn a smack in the puss’ award, was the owner of a small independent garage in South London which shall remain nameless. I took my bike in for a new tyre, and when I went back for it, found myself presented with a list of spurious other jobs that they felt my bike could benefit from, which included tightening the chain for the princely cost of £30.

I’m not a particularly practical person, but I am perfectly capable of tightening a bike chain myself. At the time, however, I was not, but £30 to do so still seemed rather excessive. They might have gotten away with it anyway, had my bike been anything but a Honda NTV (A bike with no chain). I’m pretty sure that this wouldn’t have happened to a guy!

In a bizarre twist of fate, said garage is now some five years later under new ownership; the head mechanic is a woman. I, on the other hand, am still on the hunt for the perfect pair of size six, not too wide waterproof boots; and my bloody boyfriend is probably still wondering where the hell his bike is. :-)