Take a look at any normal commuting day and I can almost guarantee that the ratio of men to women will be around 10 to 1. It's not something I had ever really consciously set out to check on but I had started takig photos of commuters in a specific part of town for the cc Flickr group when it was pointed out to me that the overwhelming majority of cyclists I was snapping were male.

The next day, at the same spot, I started looking specifically for women (and yes, I do realise how bad that sounds) and even with this as an aim I found myself taking pictures of the chaps riding by just to save myself from a morning of tedium.

So just why is it that there are so few women on bikes compared to men? We needed to speak to an expert, so enlisted the help of Caz Nicklin who runs cyclechic.co.uk which is basically a website for women who want to cycle and look good doing it.

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Before we can start to consider how to get more women onto bikes we first had to understand what the problems are in the first place. Fortunately Caz has been there, starting cycling in London two years ago, and this experience has lead her to suggest three main barriers, and primary among these is the good old fashioned nugget of safety.

For many women the roads simply look too dangerous, "I think this is due to the fact that there have been a few horror stories in the press of women getting stuck under trucks or buses and statistics showing that women are more likely to have an accident than men. City cycling is also bad advert for itself and looks far more scary to onlookers that it does when you are actually on your bike and on the road."

Ridding the world of this perception of danger is perhaps not an easy task, but it could be nothing compared to the second barrier, that of 'image'. Caz herself was, "frustrated by cycling's geeky image," when she started riding, and it was one of the reasons for the coming into being of Cyclechic. "I wanted to change perceptions of cycling and combine fashion and cycling to appeal to a new, growing breed of cyclist - young urban women.."