Many obstacles need to be addressed and overcome for women to feel safe to recreate in the outdoors; even then there is no guarantee. But one thing that has been done to help overcome constraints like the gender as mentioned earlier role socialization, motherhood and family obligations, financial priorities, lack of time, sexual harassment, lack of an outdoor companion, and fear (Warren 2015, Manning 2011) is the creation and participation in single-sex outdoor trips for women. Philosophies that guide women's and girls' programs include an ethic of care, cooperation and shared leadership, and reliance on conscious choice that resists subtle influences to conform to facilitator or program values (Warren 2015). Studies showed benefits of women-only outdoor adventure programs to be connections to nature and wilderness, relational bonding, physical confidence and strength, competence, disengagement from traditional gender roles, overcoming fear and gaining autonomy (Warren 2015).
|
Those who teach gender-sensitive outdoor programs need to reflect on their personal bias and position they bring to their teaching. In technical outdoor skill teaching, providing non-competitive learning situations that minimize performance anxiety, offering repetitive practice of skills to account for lack of childhood technical conditioning, addressing linguistic and territorial sexism in teaching environments, avoiding discriminatory programming techniques, and labeling traditional feminine strengths as positive have all been suggested as ways to enhance the learning experience of females (Warren 2015).
Not much else is being done to address the division of genders in outdoor recreation, I think this is because this can be a challenging and sensitive topic to address and it can be hard to find ways to study and address this. It can be even harder to find ways to address this, but many of the studies I read had suggestions for improvements that some of the research participants had suggested.