I think we all have these ideas about ourselves,
that we're not sexist, that we're not racist.
You're thinking I'm a good person.
I try hard not to make women uncomfortable.
There's still these smaller nuanced gestures
that are still putting women at a disadvantage.
- [Lynn] Makes me feel good that young women have
this attitude that hey, we can go out and do
anything that we want.
We are equal.
But the reality is,
this business-wise, it's not really true.
If we want to be treated equally,
we have to demand it.
We have to ask for it or we have to go out and get it.
When I moved to New York,
I didn't really know that many people.
The gym community,
it's always provided kind of this home space
for me within climbing.
When you see another climber,
you feel connected to them
'cause we're this tribe.
- Are you guys not climbing anymore?
- We're gonna go, I think.
- That's it?
- I had met a handful of strong women
and it had really changed my relationship with climbing.
Having a group of women to go out and climb with,
to train with, to push each other.
I felt it more intensely and felt more motivated.
We started an Instagram called Flash Foxy.
Just to post pictures of me and my girlfriends.
And then I started getting all these messages
from ladies who climbed with their boyfriend
and his friends,
and wanted climbing to be their own thing.
We weren't professional athletes.
We were just everyday people
and it's grown into Women's Climbing Festival
where we have panels, clinics,
and basically just women having a good time
climbing together.
This is our second year.
Last year we had about 200 people.
This year we have 300.
We sold out in a minute.
There's actually 805 people on the wait list.
So I am so happy that you are all here
and I'm really excited to spend the weekend with you.
If you're a group that's called Flash Foxy,
you're asking for it.
How can you have this like sexually playful tone,
then be like don't harass me.
I think women don't have to be de-sexualized
in order to be feminists.
While climbing is what brought us together,
it was sharing our lives together
that made us so close.
That really shifted climbing for me.
It enriched it and it made it deeper,
and I felt much more connected to it than I had
ever felt to any other sport.
When the middle of the scene that you're clearly doing
and you should say thank you because I'm
trying to give you a compliment.
- So I've had guys come up to me in the gym
with frontal shoes and try to give me advice on a climb,
like really genuinely,
and I feel like I have maybe gone about
those interactions in a wrong way,
which instead of explaining to them, right,
that it's like not, (laughing)
shh, and then walk away. (laughing)
- I get on the ones at Beta all the time.
When it happens all the time,
you start to impossibly question yourself.
- Now you're asking for Beta?
Are you asking for Beta?
I want clearance.
- So we decided to do this survey.
The survey was 28 questions.
We got about 1500 responses.
The kind of questions that we ask,
are there parts of the gym that you feel
uncomfortable in?
Have you seen or experienced aggressive harassment?
And have you seen or experienced some
of these more subtle gestures like
patronizing advice or staring?
Outside online we're interested in doing a short piece
about our findings.
There were a lot of people excited to see
questions like this.
And then on the other side there was backlash.
When feminism goes too far.
I think you're over-exaggerating.
Men are bad.
Talking to women is bad.
You're making a problem where there isn't one.
My friend that's a girl says she's never
experienced this so it must not be true.
Women are completely impossible.
They want you to look at them,
but if you do look at them,
you're in trouble.
I know cool women, I can't be sexist.
The brutally sexist and hostile environment
of a climbing gym is too much for someone.
Don't go to the climbing gym.
- That's fair.
- There were some other nastier ones, too, but.
- I'll be like maybe they should just
make their own women's climbing gym.
Then they won't have those problems.
(laughing)
No.
When I was asked to do this interview,
I was like a little like, ooh,
this is like kind of a tough subject.
It's a little uncomfortable.
You know what I mean?
And it forces you to self-reflect
and be like, well, am I a sexist?
You know?
'Cause I don't want to be a sexist.
I don't want to be that person.
I can definitely empathize with a woman
who's just getting into climbing.
There's a lot of hierarchy and posturing
and weird stuff maybe that goes on.
I guess my wife's had that.
She had like some dude spraying her down
on this boulder problem and then she flashed it,
you know, and it was his project.
And she was all, yeah, and I really don't
need Beta on this V4 (bleeping).
So I mean, there's those guys out there.
Yeah, should I put him down then?
Yeah, cool.
If they're not in it, we should just put them down.
You're a good boy.
I can speak for myself and say that some of the most
inspiring climbers I know are women,
because they're good.
So if this can lead to a point where
women are more on an equal playing field,
we're gonna have more strong female heroes.
One of the great things about climbing
is that we have this great moment where
one of the most iconic climbs of all time
was done first by a woman.
- Feeling empowered is something that you have to take.
And as a woman that's the lesson I think
that we're learning.
So man is always trying to do the accomplishment
and go after that accolade.
And a woman's like, we like doing,
we're feeling really good when we're climbing well.
To be the first, it's like,
it's almost a secondary thought for us.
So I knew I had this unique opportunity
to go to Yosemite, one of the most famous
climbing areas in the world,
and do one of the most famous big wall climbs in the world
and be a woman to do it first.
I knew that that would wake people up
and say, wow, a woman did that?
And she did it before the men?
People still to this day don't even realize.
Oh, like she was the first woman.
No, no, no, the first person.
It's years and years of assumptions that people have,
deep seeded, and they don't even know that they
have those assumptions.
I was an example.
I got people's attention,
doesn't mean that the battle is won.
There's a series of questions I would ask.
How important is this?
What's the right way to approach it?
And then I think it's our duty to do the right thing.
That's how change happens.
- [Shelma] The issues that we're talking about in climbing
are just a microcosm of what happens in society.
- People's expectations of how you show up as a leader
are defined by what they think a strong male leader is.
- If you look at most of the leadership teams,
they're mostly men, they're mostly white men.
There's so much research out there that
people will look to someone who looks like them
and give them the benefit of the doubt
versus someone who maybe doesn't look like them
would need to prove themselves.
You go on a noon bike ride and the CEO goes,
everyone's welcome to come along.
But who can hang with the CEO,
who's usually a man.
Or the women who might have other responsibilities
outside of work can't go on the ride
because they have to get their work done
in a really limited amount of time.
The profiler, the silhouette is,
employees get to the manager or the director level
and that's where we start to see a discrepancy
between men advancing and women advancing.
- It's not necessarily saying well we have to have 50/50.
It's just being respectful of individual choices
and not saying that women have to adopt
the same attitude as a man.
As women start families,
that might not be what they want to do.
I think we just have to have the opportunity.
- Climbing is really important to a lot of us.
It's our community.
So if you're going to create change,
it makes sense that you start in the places that you know.
So on one side it totally sucks to have
strangers talking trash about you online.
But on the other hand, people are talking about it.
- When the article came out,
like it yeah, it was a catalyst for me
to talk with my boyfriend.
It never occurred to me that he didn't
think about the things that I thought about
when I walk into climbing situations.
- The hope is that it provides an outlet
for women who maybe are thinking these things
and haven't really had an ability to create
a conversation out of it.
I just get tired of being better than all the guys.
I grew up as a self-proclaimed tomboy.
It's something I've been thinking about a lot.
I kind of want to rebel against that.
Women don't have to be tomboys to
want to run around and go outside
and get beat up and dirty.
And also, you don't even have to be this
stereotype of being someone who's outdoorsy
as a woman.
We can embrace beauty in our playfulness,
in our sexuality, without being objectified.
I think that it's about women's rights,
but this also includes the rights
of other marginalized groups.
I want to open up these conversations in climbing
where we can make concrete change that will
affect everybody on a larger scale.