Not so long ago, customers walking into a bike shop looking for a women’s-specific bike would be offered a good selection of models designed with women in mind. These bikes varied significantly; some offered different colourways to the unisex options, many had narrower handlebars and a women’s-specific saddle, and a few were even designed for women from the frame up. Yet today, besides the dedicated women’s cycling brand Liv, there are very few companies that still offer women’s-specific bikes.
We spoke to industry movers and shakers including American pioneer Georgena Terry; and Bonnie Tu, the founder of Liv Cycling; Ribble Cycles’ new product development manager Kathy Beresford; and global communications manager Ben Hillsdon at Canyon, to help us dig deeper into the history of women’s-specific design and consider why women’s bikes are not as commonplace as they once were.
The birth of women’s bikes
Georgena Terry is regularly credited as the inventor of women’s-specific bicycles. A combination of passion for cycling, which had started a few years after finishing college, and her training as a mechanical engineer, led Terry to start hand-building her own bicycle frames in her basement in Pennsylvania in the early ’80s. “Once I started doing it,” Terry explains, “I found that a lot of potential customers who were coming to me
