Women Who Ride: How Female Motorcyclists Are Reshaping the Sport
The numbers have been shifting for years, but 2024 made it impossible to ignore: female riders are the fastest-growing demographic in motorcycling. The Motorcycle Industry Council’s survey data shows women now represent roughly 20% of motorcycle owners in the US — up from around 8% in 1998. Among new riders, the percentage is even higher.
That’s not a demographic curiosity. It’s a structural change in who motorcycling is for — and the sport is catching up to it in real time.
What’s Driving the Growth
The growth in female ridership doesn’t have a single cause. A few things have happened at once:
The barrier of “bikes are for men” has weakened. It was never accurate — women have been riding since the first decades of motorcycling — but it was culturally enforced in ways that kept many women out. That enforcement has loosened significantly, partly because visibility has increased. When new riders see people who look like them on bikes, the sport feels accessible.
The gear situation has improved. For decades, women who rode had two options: buy men’s gear in a small size and deal with poor fit, or buy pink products that offered inferior protection. The industry has responded — slowly and imperfectly, but genuinely — with women-specific gear in actual women’s sizing with the same CE ratings available in men’s gear. Better gear makes riding more comfortable. More comfortable means more likely to keep riding.
Community infrastructure has built up. Online communities, riding groups, YouTube channels, and podcasts specifically for women riders have created entry points that didn’t exist before. New riders have places to ask questions and find people to ride with. That’s significant — the early stages of learning to ride are a lot easier with community than without it.
Smaller displacement and lighter bikes have become legitimate. The idea that “real” motorcycling required a heavy 800cc+ machine has faded. The ADV segment, in particular, has normalized mid-size and lightweight bikes in a way that removed an implicit gatekeeping mechanism. A rider on a 400cc ADV isn’t questioned the same way a rider on a 400cc sport bike was in 2005.
Where Women Are Riding
Female riders are not clustered in one corner of the sport. They’re across segments: adventure touring, sport riding, custom building, flat track, track days, scooters, touring, and everything in between.
The adventure touring segment has been particularly notable. ADV riding rewards careful preparation, mechanical curiosity, and long-distance planning — traits that skew toward organized, methodical riders rather than people who like to go fast. Women are overrepresented in ADV communities relative to the overall female ridership numbers.
Custom building is another area where female riders have built real visibility. Builders like Jody Perewitz, Sara Liberte, and the community around events like Mama Tried have demonstrated that motorcycle building — the actual fabrication and mechanical work, not just the aesthetic — is not gendered work. The machines don’t care who built them.
What the Community Actually Looks Like
The stereotype of women riders as a niche subculture within motorcycling is a few years out of date. The reality is more like: female riders are riders. They ride the same roads, deal with the same mechanical issues, argue about the same gear choices, and get just as opinionated about tire compounds as everyone else.
What still exists — and is worth acknowledging — is a set of community spaces that are specifically built for female riders. These aren’t exclusionary; they serve a real function. They give newer riders a place to ask questions that can feel intimidating in a mixed environment, and they create riding groups with specific culture norms around support and skill development rather than showing off.
Some of the most active communities include Women Riders Now (wrn.com), the Female and Femme Motorcyclists group, and dozens of regional groups organized through Facebook, Discord, and local riding clubs.
For the Industry: Catching Up Is Still in Progress
The growth in female ridership has outpaced the industry’s response in several areas. Dealer culture still skews heavily toward assuming a woman in the showroom is shopping for someone else. Gear sizing remains inconsistent across brands. And marketing has been slow to reflect who’s actually buying motorcycles versus who used to buy them.
This is worth noting not as a complaint but as a gap. Dealerships and brands that have genuinely adapted — training staff to treat all buyers as buyers, stocking women’s gear beyond the token shelf, featuring real female riders in marketing rather than poseurs in bikinis — have seen the results in sales and loyalty.
For Riders: The Best Time to Get Into This Is Now
If you’re a woman who has been thinking about riding but hasn’t started — the timing is good. The community infrastructure is the strongest it has ever been. The gear is better. The bikes are more accessible. And the number of experienced female riders willing to mentor newer ones has never been higher.
Start with the MSF Basic Rider Course. Find a local women’s riding group before you need one, not after. And build your garage — the records, the history, the machine knowledge — from ride one.
Moto Frontier is built for every rider. Your garage, your machines, your ride history — tracked and owned by you, free forever.