“Tell gender bias to take a hike”

I came across a blog post titled “Tell gender bias to take a hike” which was written in 2018 by Kate Van Waes, the Executive Director at American Hiking Society and which relates to hiking and the gender bias around this outdoor activity. You may have or have not thought about it before but when it concerns hiking, gender bias usually occurs because of the debate on hiking being an outdoor activity mainly suitable for men rather than women because of the backpack that must be carried throughout this activity.

Image from Jake Melara from Unsplash.

The author starts by discussing about her childhood experiences and recalls the day where she went on a hike with her family and saw her dad secretly taking off the weight from her mother’s backpack while her mother was secretly putting it right back. For the author, it was the fact that she saw her mother putting back the weight that did not influence her to think of hiking with the notion that it is an activity for men and not for women they are not able to carry their backpack. This was a good idea from the author to include this personal experience at the beginning of the post as the assumption that women are not able to carry their backpack is definitely not true and is in fact contributing to gender bias. According to a research, “the ability of a hiker to carry a backpack depends on the weight of the hiker” (Shea, 2018, p. 79). Therefore, there is no reason why a woman cannot carry her backpack as the weight of the backpack depends on the body structure of the hiker regardless of their gender and for safety precautions, the weight will never be more than 10-15 percent of the person's total body weight (Shea, 2018).

Moreover, it was definitely a great attempt from the organization American Hiking Society to create and promote the #HikeLikeaGirl2018 on every social media platform to challenge gender biases by encouraging girls and women to show their strength and power through hiking. However, I think that the organization could have used more powerful words to create an appealing hashtag as the strategic use of hashtags on social media platforms is an effective way of promoting social change (Saxton et al., 2015). Hashtags like #HikingIsGenderless or #Hiking4everyone could have been used as I feel that the #HikeLikeaGirl2018 is not stronger enough because people might think that yes they can hike BUT like a girl thus bringing back the stereotypes that a male hiker will always be here to remove the weight for the backpack.

Hiking is genderless and women should continue to mobilize to put an end to gender bias.

Reference List

Saxton, G. D., Niyirora, J. N., Guo, C., & Waters, R. D. (2015). AdvocatingForChange: The strategic use of hashtags in Social Media Advocacy. Advances in social work, 16(1), 154-169. https://doi.org/10.18060/17952

Shea, M. J. (20180. Backpack weight and the scaling of the Human Frame II. The Physics Teacher, 56(2), 79-82. https://doi-org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/10.1119/1.5021432

Waes, K. V. (2018). Tell gender bias to take a hike. American Hiking Society. https://americanhiking.org/blog/tell-gender-bias-to-take-a-hike/

Credit

The image used has been retrieved from https://unsplash.com/photos/Yh6K2eTr_FY