A surfing friend of mine regularly points out the lack of diversity in our local surfing community. Which is true, heavily dominated by white dudes 20s-40s.
He doesn’t foil (yet) but does watch many of the endless string of videos I send him. He made an interesting observation: in all the online content, he hasn’t seen a single woman surf/prone foiler. When I think on it, he’s right. There’s a fair number of female wingers and maybe sup foilers too, but it’s pretty rare to see women surf foil.
Locally it’s zero. But it’s also zero sup foil. And roughly 0.5% wing foil too. The foiling bug around here is predominantly a boy’s club. [it’s also mostly white and middle aged, but we’ll leave those for another topic!]
Curious to know if that’s the same elsewhere?
For surfing, the big change locally seemed to coincide with some female-only surf schools, which normalized it for regular folk (as there always were a handful of hard cores over the years). For kiting and windsurfing, doesn’t seem to be the same pattern.
Dunno…just an interesting outside observation.