DIRT ARENAS, Not Glass Ceilings
Four decades ago, a young woman named Lyn Anderson competed in a reined cow horse event at the Salinas Rodeo. The open finals had come down to just five riders: Anderson and four men. With only one rider left to go, the three big-name trainers came up and started congratulating her for the win—because the last rider was having a lot of problems with his cow.
“We all knew our scores,” she says, “so they figured I’d won. Well…I ended up second.”
Back at the trailer, one of the trainers sought her out to ask, “Doesn’t it make you mad?”
Her answer: “‘I’m used to it.’ And at that point in time, I was.”
Anderson’s outlook, though, was one of moving on. She understood that while building her business, she couldn’t say to her customers “I should have won…” while blaming her gender.
Even today, it’s no secret that if you compare the number of open/professional riders in the Western performance horse industry to the number of non-pros, you’ll see a disproportion in the number of women versus men—that is, there are more male professional riders than female and more female non-pros than male. Still, things are changing, and even though female pro trainers remain in the minority, you’re starting to see them taking on the men in some of the largest Western disciplines.
The Start of a Movement
“Things are a whole lot different now than they were 35 years
