Over 100 bikers from the Manitoba motorcycle community gathered in Winnipeg for the 20th International Female Ride Day to celebrate women on the road and bringing the community together.<\/p>\n
The global event is held annually on the first Saturday of May to promote, empower, and increase the visibility of women in motorcycling and power sports. The movement was founded in 2007 by motorcycle advocate Vicki Gray.<\/p>\n
Every year the event selects a female organization to raise funds and this year the community is supporting Villa Rossa, a Winnipeg non-profit that provides assistance to pregnant persons in need of help and safe space.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing able to impact women who need some strength and empowerment and being able to offer that and riders and say: \u2018hey, we see you, we haven\u2019t forgotten you are there and you are struggling. we want you to know that we care,\u2019\u201d said Jessica Doucette, coordinator, Indian Ladies First Manitoba.<\/p>\n
This year for the first time in Manitoba\u2019s female ride day men were encouraged to take part as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cLots of us learned to ride from our fathers, so we wanted to make sure men knew that they were seen in our world too,\u201d Doucette said.<\/p>\n
Kari-Ann Leathwood says it is encouraging to see more women joining motorcycling community.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe empowerment. Love it. To see more ladies riding because when I started back in the 90s there weren\u2019t many women riders,\u201d Leathwood said.<\/p>\n
She added that it was a lot more intimidating to be a woman on the road with motorcycles not being adjusted to fit female riders when she first began.<\/p>\n
Shaune Slobodzian started riding a motorcycle 49 year ago. She says she is glad to see more women take up bikes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a lot of progress over the years,\u201d Slobodzian said. \u201cNever would have guessed that would have happened back then.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over 100 bikers from the Manitoba motorcycle community gathered in Winnipeg for the 20th International Female Ride Day…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":643946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,22073],"class_list":["post-643945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-winnipeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}