Much fewer women on Strava? Female perspectives welcome

Posting publicly on Strava, Garmin, or any fitness tracking app is extremely dangerous for for females. There are a lot of creeps in the world, and I hope most women will post the locations on these apps. It is a stalkers play ground.

Exactly..., way too many creeps out there!

Even as a guy, I don't have strava with my name on it. As a woman I would not post runs from at or near my house or predictable regular runs. Maybe only races and key workouts.

"Hey everyone, I was stalking women on Strava, and was wondering why so many women hide their workout/location data from the public, I was just doing "research" ... it's even more weird because I'm totally able to stalk women's pictures on Instagram all day, but for some reason, the on the app where posts are tied to a location, they hide it from the public. What gives? I'm a totally normal guy just doing research. I promise"

They don't want to get raped and murdered. Men on the other hand are over confident, when it comes to protecting themselves.

Because Strava started primarily as a cyclist program, and women are only 10% of cyclists

Guys here are crazy and obsessed. Murderers/rapists typically aren't part of the running community, do you think the people who do such bad things go on Strava to look for and target people?? You guys have no idea how few % of the general population even know what Strava is.

All the girls I know on Strava have no problem sharing their data and there has never been a Strava-related incident.

The two good points were

1) that Strava started as cycling program - that's true and definitely explains a lot. Female cyclists are quite often on Strava. But even here people will probably argue that cyclists can't be stalked or attacked that easily.

2) that Strava is about "skill". Females are very competitive and wouldn't be able to handle if another female runs their easy runs or tempo runs faster. They would get frustrated. Guys usually are motivated by others, so they have no issue.

Strava has been around for many years, and I've yet to read in the news that it causes any problems for females (only thing I remember is a US base in Afghanistan being discovered because the stupid soldiers were using Strava..).

I don’t know, maybe they don’t want to advertise their cycling/running routine? And this despite many women being conceited enough to litter the internet with selfies (IG, FB, etc). I only know 2 women on strava. One is the wife of a former cycling buddy, and the other a friend whom I introduced strava to.

To avoid creeps and morons who think we're "not able to understand the numbers as well as males do," of which there is ample overlap.

Strava sounds like a creepy stalker’s haven. ?

A better question is: why are so many people on Strava at all? I just don't see the point.

Duder wrote:

I don’t know, maybe they don’t want to advertise their cycling/running routine? And this despite many women being conceited enough to litter the internet with selfies (IG, FB, etc).

Another good point. I "investigated" many of these female runners IG profiles. The vast majority of them just posts pictures of themselves and doesn't talk about the workout, splits etc. They respond to random questions like how they felt after the workout, but ignore the ones that ask for splits or total/weekly volume. WHY?

Why do women make such a big secret of their training? Are they so scared that another female is gonna copy it, and might improve because of it? Just doesn't make any sense how they are thinking. I'm not even talking about pros that might be restricted by their coach, but all those sub-elites or hobby joggers with times of 34-39 min 10k.

Second question - why are men ok with showing their running routine/workouts/routes in the public, but not women? If they claim they are too busy, that's not a good excuse, as everything can be auto-setup so as soon as the run is ended on the watch it syncs and gets on Strava, no human input needed.

Female here. competitive runner and cyclist for a long time and have lots of friends on strava. I never got into it. As many people out there that think their every meal needs to be posted and every workout dissected, there are more people that think what you do is nobody else's business.

but, i have to admit that it looks like a great way to track workouts and i'm considering doing it but keeping it private.

Strava's dumb. Strava's stupid. Women are smarter so there are fewer women on Strava.

BlackSwanGroup262 wrote:

Posting publicly on Strava, Garmin, or any fitness tracking app is extremely dangerous for for females. There are a lot of creeps in the world, and I hope most women will post the locations on these apps. It is a stalkers play ground.

YMMV wrote:

Even as a guy, I don't have strava with my name on it. As a woman I would not post runs from at or near my house or predictable regular runs. Maybe only races and key workouts.

These guys get it.

As a guy, I have known at least a few dudes who have basically gone to doxing-level research on girl they liked.

In one case, the guy bragged to a group of co-workers that there was not a thumbprint of hers on the internet that he did know of. Like every past job, every hobby, every single social profile, he said he Googled usernames from one site to find and scour more profiles of her on other sites and forums, and got to the point of "knowing" friends from different parts of her life, by their photos. He started going to her work (a cafe) when he knew she was on. He "called her on it" when he asked her to hang out one weekend. (She said she would be away, and he knew she wouldn't because of some Instagram post. I didn't ask for a detailed explanation.) Pretty uncomfortable stuff.

And this is just what he was willing to tell an acquaintance over a beer, among a large group of guys. I can't imagine what else some of these guys are doing that they DON'T share readily.

"Much fewer"?

So because there are some black sheeps in the running community, all women should be discouraged to use Strava? Strava is an excellent platform for tracking workouts, get motivation and see how friends, club members or sub-elites/pros are doing. People kept posting Drew Hunter and Austin's workouts and Strava profiles many times, to illustrate Tinman training. What if there would have been a girl in Tinman Elite?

Instead of telling women not to use Strava, the people who potentially make it a bad experience for them should be punished. Their profiles should be deleted with a life-long ban, or whatever hurts those "real-life stalkers" like the coffee-shop dude.

If you post your runs or other activities there, it shows your location. Anyone can then see where you live, where you run. A perfect tool for stalking. Logically there would be less women then. Men are generally not stalked, women are.

Same reason why if you run at night you will mostly see just guys. Guys generally don't have to worry about their safety outside. Women always have to consider their safety before going outside.

Samona wrote:

face it, some among us are creeps wrote:

As a guy, I have known at least a few dudes who have basically gone to doxing-level research on girl they liked.

(etc)

So because there are some black sheeps in the running community, all women should be discouraged to use Strava?

Instead of telling women not to use Strava, the people who potentially make it a bad experience for them should be punished. Their profiles should be deleted with a life-long ban, or whatever hurts those "real-life stalkers" like the coffee-shop dude.

Your answer is really dumb.

One in a million people might kidnap a small child, so we don't leave four year-olds alone at a playground.

That doesn't mean "because there are some black sheep in the community, all children should be discouraged." It means that even if something is rare, the potential for a very negative outcomes shapes people's behavior.

Nobody is "telling women not to use Strava." Did I say that? No. They are choosing not to, in many cases for the reason I outline. I agree that there should be bans for abuse of the service, and there already are. But how effective is when you just need to new email to start another account? (Think how useless Twitter "bans" are.)