By Eemer Eivers
For the past two years, the Museum of Childhood Ireland has been running a blog series called When We Were Kings and Queens of the Road. It is a look back at childhood, recalling how the freedom experienced on journeys between home and school shaped each writer, but it has another function. It highlights how public spaces, in particular our roads and paths, have a profound impact on how young people grow and develop.
Children and young people’s access to the public realm, to parks, paths and roads is a basic human right and a prerequisite for a healthy lifestyle. Kings and Queens uses personal stories to suggest that such access is shrinking – a view backed up by a recent Central Statistics Office report on travel to school. What they found was that independent travel to school on foot or by bike had halved between 1986 and 2022.
Back in 1986, almost half of all primary and second level students either walked or cycled to school. Primary school pupils typically walked (45%) with 4% cycling. Walking was a little less popular at second level (32%), but over 15% hopped on their bike to get to school. Fast forward to 2022 and we see much fewer walking to school, far more being driven, and a collapse in cycling. The shift away from bikes is most obvious at second level, where cycling rates are roughly one quarter of what they were in 1986.
There is some good news though from the 2022 census, which was the first since 1986 not to show declining cycling rates. One of the few positives during our prolonged Covid lockdown was a cycling renaissance as people avoided public transport and enclosed spaces. The peak of the cycling wave may have passed but the improved cycling infrastructure introduced in response to Covid means we now see more cyclists of all ages.
So why this blog? Well, despite its important role in early feminism and the suffragette movement, cycling has become a very gendered activity. When modern bikes were invented in the late 19th century, Victorian era women embraced cycling because it offered them a way to move about safely in public without a chaperone, a horse or a husband. The cycling craze contributed to the so-called Rational Clothing Movement, as women eschewed crinolines and corsets in favour of the relative freedoms of bloomers and knickerbockers. The humble bicycle became a symbol of and a route to female emancipation.
“Maidens with a disregard for convention” by William Gordan Davis, 1895
National Cycle Archive, University of Warwick.
That is no longer true. The census shows us that there has always been a little bit of a gender gap in cycling. Back in 1986, boys were about one-and-a-half times more likely than girls to cycle to school. In the intervening years the gender gap has widened slightly at primary, but the second level gap is now a chasm. Campaign groups such as #andshecycles tell us that teenage boys are between 7 and 10 times more likely than are teenage girls to cycle to school. Fewer than 1% of girls (yes, you read that correctly) cycle to a second level school.
If we look at why, researchers in the University of Limerick reported that females of all ages are 25 times more likely than males to experience sexual harassment while cycling. Among the second level students they surveyed, the biggest gender difference in perceived obstacles to cycling was the school uniform. In a related vein, teenage girls told #andshecycles campaigners about being laughed at because cycling is “uncool” for girls, about being harassed, and described how their school uniform made cycling impractical.
So what can be done? We can certainly welcome recent improvements in our embryonic cycling infrastructure. At the same time, we can highlight that the design of some popular forms of cycling lanes can be sexist. We can also look at how schools can increase cycling among all students, but especially girls. The campaign #andshecycles provides a set of handy hints for young people and their schools, including how to address the issue of school uniform. And in this “State Exam Season” when we see so many students stressed and tired, we can tell them how research shows that regular short bouts of cycling reduces stress levels, increases motivation, attention and cognitive functioning. It really is the smart thing to do.
As a society, we need to get on our bikes and advocate for cycling as a healthy activity appropriate for all, rather than hopping into a car. We need to challenge inappropriate comments when we hear them (even if not easy to do) and to ensure that young people get to experience at least some of the right to roam the roads that we had when growing up. Everyone deserves a chance to be the King or Queen of their own school journey.
Dr Eemer Eivers is the Museum’s Education Team lead, and the views expressed here are personal. Thanks are due to Drs Suzanne O’Keefe and Regina Murphy for editorial advice. Eemer’s interest in gendered cycling patterns derives from a complaint she made about a Dublin bike share company assigning female names to all their bikes, and the ensuing social media response.
