Am I sexist?
We were riding on a chairlift when my other half noticed that there’s still quite a lot of people out there skiing or snowboarding without a helmet. My first reaction was: “Yes and look, most of them are men!”
But after having a second look (down), I pondered: Is it more men not wearing helmets or is it just because there are fewer women on the slopes?
After a cracking day, going up and down the mountain, that evening I sat down with a glass of wine and did some serious digging. On the SkiClub website I found a consumer research paper on snowsports with some interesting data. SkiClub is the biggest membership-based snowsports club in the UK.
Well, it doesn’t look good – there is indeed fewer women on the slopes, and the numbers are falling. As for the helmets, different sources provide slightly different numbers – from 64% to 88% of people on the slopes ride with a helmet. For this exercise, I settled on the 80% figure which seems representative.
Great, so it looks I’m not sexist after all! Without taking into account other factors (age, gender differences, risk-taking behaviour, etc.), it’s simply because there are more men on the slopes. This makes men more like likely to be spotted without a helmet.