We thought that only men would be interested in TFC’s (Trails For Change NGO) trail building work. However, it seems more females are applying for the trail builder jobs. Are you surprised? We are too.
53% (Fifty-three percent) of the applicants to work as a trail builder with heavy tools have been women. The involvement of those women in related areas has also increased, and in some cases, they now have exceeded male participation. Let’s take a look at the numbers.
The Transcaucasian Trail (TCT) is the longest hiking trail in the region with an approximate distance of 3000 km. The building of the trail started in 2016 and is nearing completion over the next few years. The TCT team has informed us that of the 200 volunteer applicants since its launch, 120 have been females.
Over the last three years, the hiking trips with ArmLand hiking group, 1201 of the participants were female, while 623 were male. According to the founder Artyom Martirosyan: “Once we had the problem of encouraging girls to hike, now we see the opposite phenomenon.”
Soon we will see the same issue amongst mountain guides. This thought occurred to us after we spoke to the vice-president of the Armenian Alpine Federation, Suren Danielyan. The Federation trains mountain guides, with women making up 65% of participants.
Amongst tour guides, women exceed men many times over. Tour Guide Expert, Davit Davtyan’s preparation classes, are often made up of 80% of women. Davit said: “On my current group from the 26 participants only 7 are male.”
The number of female bike riders has also increased. Emil Asatryan, who is the founder of the Velo club, which is developing cycling culture in Armenia, says cheerfully “Now during every cycling tour we have some ten females. Not long ago we were going only with boys.
According to the Cycling Federation’s president Arman Antonyan during the last couple of years, the girls number in cycling culture is significantly higher. They now make up 25-30 % of participants.
According to the Armenian Alpine club’s co-founder Mkhitar Mkhitaryan the numbers of girls taking part in rock climbing has stayed the same in recent years at just 40 %.
See you in the mountains!