Last week, the New York Times stuck its toe in the waters of New York City’s bicyclist gender divide, and draws several conclusions. We’ve addressed the “Why don’t more women bike?” question before, but as biking sees an unprecedented rise in popularity —and funding — the issue has gained a few points on the public discussion Richter Scale.

The gender disparity in biking — three men currently bike for every one woman — is a constant undercurrent of the cycling debate, and has been addressed in everything from women’s biking initiatives to bike boutiques selling products just for female riders.

Media coverage of the Great Gender Divide has done a good job of narrowing down what isn’tgetting more women to ride bikes — more fashionable helmets and cuter bike colors being prime examples. But when it comes to what is working, there’s less clarity.

As we said before, safety remains a key concern for women. The Times points out that in actuality, biking is no less safe for women than it is for men (though the stats are a bit questionable given that there aren’t equal numbers of men and women riding in the first place). Still, perception is a powerful thing — if women think biking is unsafe, they are less likely to engage in it than men (this isn’t a mere generalization — it’s even been used as an argument for why men dominate high-risk fields like banking). Media contributes to the unsafe perceptions as well; when a cyclist dies, particularly when a female cyclist dies, it inevitably makes headlines.

Of course no single issue applies to ALL women, just as nothing applies to ALL men. But when you get down to the core of the women-and-biking debate, safety is the primary hurdle. Convenience – the ability to cart around groceries or shopping bags, etc. — is also a factor, as is the “I don’t want to look like a sweaty mess when I arrive at my destination” trope that always seems to get trudged out whenever the women-biking topic is discussed. But both of these still pale in comparison to safety.

Meanwhile, whether or not the “women don’t bike” mantra will be true in a few years is up for questioning. Streetsblog’s Ben Fried points out that the Times does little to note just how much progress NYC has made in growing the number of women cyclists — in fact, according to a2010 Department of Planning study he cites, the gender gap “narrowed from about 1.9 men for every woman in 2002, to about 1.7 in 2008, with most of the change happening between 2006 and 2008.” In other words, the gap is narrowing at an accelerated pace, likely because of all the money put into making biking safer over the past few years.

So what’s working as far as getting female cyclists to hit the NYC streets? Separating bike lanes from traffic – an act that goes straight to the core of the safety issue. As Fried points out:

Researchers like Harvard’s Anne Lusk, and Portland State University’s Jennifer Dill have all come to the conclusion that the share of female cyclists is higher where separation from traffic is more pronounced. Their positions are consistent with DCP’s finding that the gender gap on NYC’s greenways is substantially smaller than it is on painted bike lanes.

When you are talking about bike lanes that are separated from traffic entirely (by a real partition, as opposed to a painted white line) then the gender divide lessens dramatically. Which leads one to conclude that if we increase the number of separated bike lanes, we will increase the number of women riders. Regardless of whether they get sweaty.

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