One of the most important findings from our research were that whilst 62% of men recognise there is an issue, only 18% believe the responsibility lies most with them to help women feel safer when running. How does the male community play a part in this? What is adidas doing to speak to them specifically? Our app now has the ability for a runners’ live location to be automatically shared with selected followers to help track their run. Our research showed that 69% of women have taken precautions to feel safer whilst running, and of that 28% shared their location with a friend. And thirdly, we have used our adidas Running app platform to engage and educate our wider running community on the issue, and to date, have over 120,000 signatures to our pledge (which is “I pledge to never commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women”). Secondly, we’ve created communities and spaces to support the cause with our long-term initiative With Women We Run by adidas Runners, which is focused on educating members and creating safe spaces for women to run. We have already used this to train more than 250 coaches and captains (both men and women) from the adidas Running crews all over the world. White Ribbon guided us with advice, workshops and co-authoring tools such an educational programme that is available to all, designed to educate men on how to take action, become allies and really help drive change. We’ve broken it down into three areas where we’ve invested to help create this change firstly we’ve continued our work with our expert partner and leading charity on the prevention of violence and harassment against women – White Ribbon. It’s a huge figure isn’t it, but I can’t say I’m surprised, and I’m sure many women reading this will feel the same. How is the brand hoping to make a change? The research shows that 92% of women don’t feel safe when running. I would love to think that my experiences are one-offs but the sad fact is that so many women have exactly the same experiences and so these precautions and behaviours have become a normality. I’ll never run when it’s getting dark and if I see another person or a group of people coming towards me, I will instinctively move to the other side of the road. I have had a lot of cat-calling experiences which have always made me feel vulnerable and exposed. What’s your own experience with running and safety been like? So, we have been doing work on allyship and advocacy for a while now – we started working with the charity White Ribbon at the start of 2022 and have been training adidas Runners captains and coaches as part of With Women We Run (also launched in 2022) initiative ever since. We’ve known the scale of the issue is longstanding, and as women runners ourselves, we all had some kind of personal experience that made us feel unsafe. These completely normalized yet “ridiculous” behaviors that make women feel safer when running showed the huge disparity in perceptions of safety between men and women – this is where we saw our role to spark positive change, where we could use our global platform to drive awareness on the need for male allyship and education. And so often, the news agenda narrative places responsibility around preventing risk solely on women – from telling them what to wear, to not run at night, or not run with headphones, the list goes on. What made adidas want to tackle this now?īefore we started out on this journey, we did some research on the topic and found that 48% of social conversation about women’s running was related to safety. Safety for women in running has long been an issue. Scroll down to read the full interview and check out adidas’ “Ridiculous Run” campaign above. We caught up with Neubrandt to find out more about the campaign, what sparked the research behind it and how adidas plans to address its male community about the significance of their support. In a bid to combat the issue, adidas has released a new campaign, dubbed “The Ridiculous Run.” The visual identity aims to depict the “ridiculous” measures that women have to take when trying to be safe on the road, from keys in their hands to only wearing one earphone. As a result, “having the support of men is so important to creating true progress here,” explains adidas Women’s Global Communications Director, Sina Neubrandt. Within the brand’s research, it discovered that 62% of men recognise there is an issue, while only 18% believe the responsibility lies mostly with them to help women feel safer when running. In part, a large portion of the responsibility lies with our male counterparts, an element which adidas recognizes to be true.
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