This is part 7 of 8 of my summer series on women in trail running. See the whole series here.
I’ve been a girl/woman in male-dominated sports since I was 6 years old. For many of those years, I thought the gender gap problem was about confidence.
That if more women just “believed in themselves,” they’d take up more space in sports. Then they’d sign up for the race! Apply for the job! Stop apologizing for literally just existing on the trail!
Let’s be real: I wanted to believe that, because a confidence problem is one I can solve. I can write an essay, host a workshop, or build a scholarship program. (And I do, and those help, but they don’t change a toxic system at its root.)
What I didn’t notice earlier in my career, because the entire industry was telling me the opposite, is that confident women athletes still get underpaid, harassed, and ignored. It was never about individual mindset or picking yourself up by your shoelaces.
Recently, as I ideate around next year’s First 50k Sisterhood program expansion, I’ve been digging into reports put together by the Running Industry Diversity Coalition, specifically their 2023–2025 published research on diversity in trail running and barriers to the sport. (As well as the Outdoor Industry Association’s Participation Trends report.)
Here are some of the findings I keep thinking about. (I’ve attempted to cite specific data within the writing, but go explore their research body as a whole!)
When we talk about “women in sports,” who are we really talking about?
New outdoor sports participants have been majority women for a decade.[1] In 2024, all of the growth in outdoor participation came from people of color. White participation slightly went down.[2]
So the woman signing up for her first trail race, the one many brands claim to be building products for, is more than ever a woman of color. If our races, media, events, and products aren’t deeply thinking of her, then we’re not truly thinking about the women showing up and growing in the sport. (And in worst cases, we’re just doing it for a “representation” photo to check a box.)
Women runners of color face far more barriers than white women runners. Consider a white woman hitting structural barriers to running: No childcare at the race. A sponsorship that pays in gear instead of cash and that disappears when she turns 40 or has a kid. A governing body with no women in leadership. She’s told the barrier is internal. Work on your limiting beliefs! Find your why! Join a community!
Now consider that for a woman of color, because she gets the double dose. Everything above, plus: races where 80 percent of white runners always feel safe and only 56 percent of runners of color do,[3] apparel cut for a body the industry decided was standard (a white one), and price, which women of color name as the number one unmet need in both shoes and apparel.[4]
The women’s panel (which is usually all white or nearly all white) says: Believe in yourself! The industry (which focuses on products for white people) says: The trail is free, just get out there! We get messaging on confidence when that was never the reported problem.
Telling women to work on their mindset while leaving the existing structure untouched is just gaslighting with fancy Nike branding.
Is it a lack of confidence? Or a lack of safety?
Of the runners of color who report feeling unsafe on trails, 63 percent are women.[5] Latina and gender-expansive runners described their pre-run routine to researchers: share your location. Send a photo of the trail. Carry your ID. Tell somebody when you plan to turn around and when you’ll be home.[6] That’s not low confidence. It’s a necessary risk assessment.
The same workplace research found that LGBTQ+ women and women with disabilities are more likely than women overall to have colleagues comment on their appearance, or tell them they look mad, or that they should smile more.[7] (BARF.) The undertone is “fix your face, shift your energy — you’re the problem, not us.” Read: ~ BeLiEve In YoUrSeLf ~
Runners of color report feeling significantly less safe than white runners. An LGBTQ+ Black runner is less safe. With every overlapping identity that faces violence at disproportionate rates, a runner becomes less safe. So instead of talking about confidence, what if we talked about how to increase running safety for a queer Black woman with a disability, for example?
This is why the industry can run a decade of “women’s initiatives” and still have women underrepresented in every leadership role, athlete roster, and board room. We’ve gotten very good at helping women adapt to a system that was never built with them in mind. That’s a whole lot of people we’re still not considering when we make decisions.
Companies wish that confidence was the problem.
When the RIDC set out to survey running companies about their own diversity numbers, they budgeted two months for recruitment. It took nearly four. In their words, they were “met with a good amount of fear and red tape conversations.”[8]
Runners fear for their physical and psychological safety. Companies fear… a survey.
The same industry that sells women resilience, that prints BE BRAVE! on a tank top, that has run a decade of panels about owning your worth, could not answer a questionnaire about its own org chart without four months of coaxing.
Out of the 63 organizations that eventually answered, 60% said they don’t know where to find qualified candidates from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.[9] In 2020, there were an estimated 16 million runners of color in the US.[10] They are, indeed, on the trail and in the run clubs, and statistically the reason this sport is gaining new members. But “we can’t find them” is a far more comfortable sentence than “we haven’t looked.”
So we tell women that confidence will teach them to advocate for themselves, because nobody else in the organization will.
If the problem’s structural, not personal, then fixing it requires truly confronting power. Not saying “just do it!” or “ignore the haters!”, but confronting the people and policies and funding decisions that created the disparity in the first place. (Which yeah, is scarier and harder.)
Mindset work isn’t useless, but it can’t be a substitute for structural change.
The Freedom to Run case study was a test in what happens when you remove more structural barriers to running. They had 14 selected BIPOC applicants receive coaching, training, gear, education, race entry, and a community. (57.1% of participants were women, 7.1% transgender.) All fourteen set out to finish a race at the end of the program, and they came out the other side logging personal distance records. One of them went home and started a trail running community that hit 100 members in 90 days.[11]
The First 50k Sisterhood inaugural cohort had very similar numbers: 15 women, 12 running the intended race, and many of them now eyeing longer distances and more community involvement than when they started.
Community works when it comes with resources. Vibes matter, sure, but PLUS a budget. Confidence, PLUS examination of a broken structure. We can’t deflect it all to just… good vibes and positive thinking.
Most mindset work teaches women to attempt to fit in better, armor up, stand tall in a place that will never actually serve them. Resilience is a great survival skill, but it was never meant to be trail running’s top strategy for women’s inclusion. Women — especially women of color — cannot simply “mindset” their way out of patriarchy, capitalism, and systems built on white supremacy.
I’ll be thinking more deeply about all this as we expand the First 50k Sisterhood. I wonder: What if the most radical thing we could do for women in sports isn’t helping them get more confident? What if it’s refusing to keep asking them to be confident enough to absorb what shouldn’t be tolerated in the first place?
Sources. All RIDC reports are published by the Running Industry Diversity Coalition, a 501(c)(3), and available at runningdiversity.com. The participation data is from the Outdoor Foundation and Outdoor Industry Association at outdoorindustry.org.
I don’t often write about research and therefore may have messed up citations; I’m trying! These reports deserve more readers than they’ve gotten, so go read them yourself.
[1] Outdoor Foundation / Outdoor Industry Association, 2025 Outdoor Participation Trends Report (2024 data), p. 71. New participants were 52.3% female in 2024, against a ten-year average of 52.9%.
[2] 2025 Outdoor Participation Trends Report, pp. 6, 21. White participation fell 1.1%, or 1.3 million participants.
[3] Running Industry Diversity Coalition, Racial Diversity in Trail Running: Understanding the Underrepresented Experience (2023), p. 17.
[4] Racial Diversity in Trail Running, pp. 26, 28, 30. Price is named the #1 concern for women in both footwear and apparel, and respondents reported that most apparel is not made for fuller or shorter body types (p. 26). Among all BIPOC respondents, 62% report unmet needs on footwear price against a 16% baseline, and 68% on apparel price against a 23% baseline.
[5] Racial Diversity in Trail Running, p. 13. Of BIPOC respondents feeling unsafe at least some of the time on trails: 63% women, 31% men, 6% nonbinary.
[6] Racial Diversity in Trail Running, p. 20.
[7] McKinsey & Company, Women in the Workplace 2022, cited in RIDC, Racial Diversity and the Business of Running: Mapping a Path to Equitable Employment, Leadership, and Ownership (2023), p. 21.
[8] Racial Diversity and the Business of Running, p. 6.
[9] Racial Diversity and the Business of Running, p. 14.
[10] RIDC, The Future of Running: Connecting With The Next Generation of Racially Diverse Runners (2023), p. 20. BIPOC runners are 34% of 46.4 million US runners and joggers aged 11+, per SFIA 2020 data.
[11] RIDC, Freedom to Run: Back Outside (2025), pp. 8, 20, 32. The community is Sin Miedo in Nashville, founded by participant Antoine Haugabook, which reached 100+ members and 3,300 Instagram followers in 90 days.
Last week on BLOOD, SWEAT + FEAR:
34 Tips for Women Who Want to Trail Run Healthier + Happier🏃♀️(Trail Running Series, Part 6)
This is part 6 of 8 of my summer series on women in trail running. See the whole series here.
Wondering how you got here? Hi, I’m Angie Lake! 👋 I’m a creative consultant and not-elite-just-enthusiastic athlete living in the mountains and rivers of Washington. I talk about the tough stuff — Blood, Sweat, and Fear — with the goal of building a happier, healthier world for women. You can check out all the ways to work with me here, or follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Thanks for highlighting the important work of the RIDC! It's been really disappointing to see that important work seemingly "forgotten about" (much like the BIPOC runners "can't be found") in discussions of expanding opportunities for female-bodied athletes and it's great to see you are listening and learning!