Watch the Women’s Outdoor Summit on YouTube

The 2021 Women’s Outdoor Summit is a free, virtual summit about making the outdoors an equitable space for women.

By on March 25, 2021 | Comments

[Editor’s Note: March is Women’s History Month! For the last seven days of March, we’re highlighting seven stories of women moving the needle forward in trail running and ultrarunning. Each article offers you a way to take action and elevate the women who make up our community. Let’s celebrate!]

The virtual Women’s Outdoor Summit took place from March 11 through the 13, and was hosted via a number of YouTube live streams on the organization’s YouTube channel. The summit was organized by Teresa Baker, JAM Collective, and Ravel Media. Each of the nine live streams are available to watch in perpetuity and for free, courtesy of the summit’s sponsors.

The goal of the summit was to provide a space for cisgender and transgender women in the outdoor industry to connect with and learn from each other. While I watched the summit as an industry professional, I’d recommend it to anyone who personally or professionally cares about creating space for women in the outdoors. To be frank, that means all of us.

The summit was robust and covered a lot of topics, some quite deeply. I found every session interesting, and some of them difficult to watch as panelists shared disturbing past experiences. The summit also offered a lot of hope, as panelists shared progress made within the organizations of which they are a part. Finally, there are lots of takeaway action items and goals for us all.

Below we embed the summit’s kickoff event, and after you watch that, head over to the Women’s Outdoor Summit YouTube channel to take in the rest of the summit.

The fact is, the outdoors remains an inequitable space for women, but we all have the ability to help change that. I hope you’ll watch the summit to learn what you can do.

Meghan Hicks

Meghan Hicks is the Editor-in-Chief of iRunFar. She’s been running since she was 13 years old, and writing and editing about the sport for around 15 years. She served as iRunFar’s Managing Editor from 2013 through mid-2023, when she stepped into the role of Editor-in-Chief. Aside from iRunFar, Meghan has worked in communications and education in several of America’s national parks, was a contributing editor for Trail Runner magazine, and served as a columnist at Marathon & Beyond. She’s the co-author of Where the Road Ends: A Guide to Trail Running with Bryon Powell. She won the 2013 Marathon des Sables, finished on the podium of the Hardrock 100 Mile in 2021, and has previously set fastest known times on the Nolan’s 14 mountain running route in 2016 and 2020. Based part-time in Moab, Utah and Silverton, Colorado, Meghan also enjoys reading, biking, backpacking, and watching sunsets.