Mariah Davenport is redefining “skateboarder” with her 2021 skate survey

Mariah grew up in Albany NY and started skating about 15 years ago with a small group of guys. It wasn’t until 2019, after she had moved to Brooklyn, that she first met another girl skateboarder. The skate industry has changed dramatically since Mariah first stepped on a board, and the last 5 years have seen huge shifts in the demographic of skateboarders around the world.

The last major survey of the skateboarding population was completed in 2018 and only measures “male” and “female” participation. It doesn’t take into consideration trans and non-binary skaters, nor does it account for the recent rise in women’s skateboarding or the impact of Covid-19. The statistics from this out-dated survey are still used to guide decisions about professional skateboarder pay rates and how skateboarding is marketed.

Mariah is on a mission to create a more accurate image of skateboarding and prove that it is more diverse than the classic cis white male picture that is still being painted. Her recent skate survey quickly gained traction and we caught up with her to see how the number crunching is going and what we can expect to see in the results.

What inspired you to create the recent skateboarding survey?

Haha, an impulsive spur of anger and passion… with a long backstory.

I’ve always been pretty outspoken about the role of women in skateboarding. Mostly because, when people told me girls can’t skate (which was alllll the time when I first fell in love with it), I always felt like I needed to find some way to prove them wrong. I used to learn the most ridiculous tricks just so I could beat random dudes in a game of S.K.A.T.E. It’s the only reason I can do an impossible or hospital flip to this day.

There were no pro women I knew of at the time to throw in their face and say “look how good she is, you’re wrong”. I was the only girl I had ever seen that was able to keep up with the guys. So in my mind, I was the only one who knew they were wrong. I guess that mindset kind of became embedded in my personality.

Last month, I was working on a couple volunteer UX projects relating to skateboarding and every time I got into research about common skater behaviors, I couldn’t relate to a lot of it. When I tried looking deeper into behaviors of specifically female skaters for comparison, the information just wasn’t there. The only thing that kept coming up was a statistic from 2018, stating that females made up 16-23% of the skateboarding population and didn’t even consider the existence of trans or non-binary skaters at all.

At first I thought I was being stupid like, ‘this is the same number I used in my 2016 study. There is no way they’re serious about this’. I felt like that number was wrong back then, but I had never met another skater girl so who was I to contest? This time though, I knew in my soul how wrong it was, because I skate with women, trans, and non-binary skaters everyday.

So, I started checking blogs and articles written in 2019 / 2020 and they were all listing the same percentages! I couldn’t find a single skateboarding article or published report recognizing any skater outside of the binary. I was so tight. In 2021, I wasn’t about to design a whole app for skaters based on only men’s needs, when I know there are thousands of new girls and gender nonconforming people skating on my feed every day.

At first I thought to myself, “Someone is going to have to do another mass sample of the skateboarding community real soon.” Then there were a few more incidents over the course of that week that kept me circling back to the fact that these numbers didn’t exist.

One of the most impactful moments for me was connecting with Courtney Burnett a few weeks prior. She was working on a research paper of her own about the profitability of marketing to women in skateboarding, but kept getting stuck on how to even begin measuring such a thing. When we first spoke, I couldn’t figure out how to help her, then I realized it was because of this lack of information. It felt like there was no way to prove just how our community was being used by the corporate side of skateboarding.

It wasn’t until I saw, in action, how this was affecting my friends in the industry, that something just sparked in me. They were signing these contracts that basically took everything, by legal standards, and were given little to no compensation in return. It was almost like being told that, as women in skateboarding, we should be grateful to even be offered free product in exchange for your marketing influence. Everyone knew there was something off about it, but the excuse you always hear is, “no one gets paid in skateboarding, not even the guys” or “that’s just how the industry works”.

It was that same feeling of knowing something they’re telling you is wrong, but having no way to prove it. I was just so tired of hearing that excuse, so I told my friends I wanted to do a mass survey of the skate community and asked if they would help spread it around. They were so beyond supportive of the idea and that’s really what drove me to do it. They really took time out of their schedules to help make it happen.

Courtney Burnett and I came up with the questions we wanted answers to. Kauai Taylor spent 5 straight days giving me feedback on every question and every edit. Briana King really helped inform the connection between career and recreational skaters. Since her girl and queer meet-up world tour, she has been a hub for women-run skate collectives around the country. Kava Vasquez has also been a key person in making this happen. She is so knowledgable about the skateboarding experience on a global level and has this beautiful ability to spark such empowering conversations surrounding social impact and community. I admire these women so much, none of this would’ve happened without them. The fact that it spread so quickly to so many different communities really goes to show how important this knowledge is for skaters as well.

Personally, I think growing up in that world, of being the only woman trying to prove herself at the skatepark, really influenced my relationship with skateboarding now. While it was always welcoming of me, it was never marketed to me and that slowed my progression down significantly. I just found out this year that there were pro women during the time I was learning to skate. As someone who was actively searching YouTube for a skater that looked like me, how come I was never able to find them? They were never on the DVDs my friends owned. I was told that girls just aren’t attracted to skateboarding, when in reality we just weren’t being represented. How girls feel about skateboarding isn’t what changed. We’ve always been here. It’s social media that actually allowed us to finally see each other, connect, and skate in a safe way. It says something about the impact representation has on accessibility, in any field.

It took me 10 years to learn that there was proof out there that girls could skate. If I had that knowledge back then, it would’ve been 10 years that I could’ve been skating harder, competing, or even just to prove to my mom that I wasn’t the only crazy girl out here on a skateboard. Yeah, things are changing now and people are content with that hope… but shit, I thought things were changing 10 years ago and we’re still having this debate, with no hard numbers to back it up. It has taken this long for the industry to even start noticing women in skateboarding, we don’t have another 10 years to wait for the same to be true for trans and non-binary skaters.

But if you were looking for the short story, I was pissed and wanted to make a point.

Do you feel like you got a pretty good sample of the skateboarding community? How many responses did you receive?

Yes! We were so shocked by the reach of the survey. I was really only expecting about 600 responses total, but I think I definitely underestimated our network (Sorry Texas!).

Each of the women who helped create the survey are core skateboarders. We are all different ages, come from different backgrounds, and started skating at different points in our lives. The one thing that connected us were Briana King’s meet ups, social media, and skateboarding.

After our team posted and shared the link, it started spreading like crazy. I think people genuinely just want to know who the skateboarding community really consists of. Being in NYC, we take for granted how many people we can find that look like us in skateboarding. For a lot of our respondents who only connect with other skaters through social media, this survey was a way to find out if there’s anyone else like them out there (the answer is yes).

We ended up with 2,961 usable responses. 2,284 are from 47 states across the U.S. and 677 international responses, coming from 63 different countries.

Did any of the results surprise you? Or were there any particularly fascinating outcomes?

Yes and no. I knew the 2018 numbers were off, but not like this. There is a misalignment between the skateboarding community and the skate industry, and it goes deeper than just gender. The more I learn, the more sense it seems to make.

We’re still crunching the numbers and trying to earn some funding so I can focus on the study full-time. I don’t want to reveal too much until I know my numbers are checked and double-checked. But there are a few very clear cut patterns that I’ve been dying to spill.

All I will say right now is that: Gender non-conforming people make up at least 25% of the skateboarding community in the U.S. alone and at least 60% of all respondents (globally) don’t feel well-represented by mainstream skateboarding media right now.

This is huge and there are nearly 3,000 reasons why. I can’t wait to understand every single one of them.

Where are you currently at with processing all the data?

We definitely weren’t anticipating the volume of responses we ended up receiving! I ended up reaching out to The Skatepark Project for a potential research grant, which would really help us sort through some of this data more efficiently. I spent the past week preparing pitches and budget proposals for the meeting and now we’re back to sorting the data manually until we hear from them. If we are able to secure some funding, the quality of information we’ll be able to release to the public would increase drastically!

What do you plan to do with the results? Where can people view them?

The first thing I’m doing when I have the information is putting out there in the most accessible and engaging way, for anyone to use however they please. I’ll definitely post an overview of the findings on my personal instagram, but will most likely direct people to @spccproject if they want all the juicy details. Eventually there will be a more detailed report released, with insights and recommendations, on the SPCC website. I have a few more ideas for how I’d like to share the content, but it all depends on the type of funding we are able to get.

For me, this survey is actually going to be the start of a deeper research project. My long-term vision is to design and develop an app, focused on catering to the needs of recreational skaters globally. I’ve got at least 6 years of research into it already, might as well keep going.

This isn’t your first time doing an independent study within skateboarding is it? Tell me about your 2016 study on the survival of local-owned skate shops.

Yes, 2016 actually wasn’t the first one either, but it was definitely the most significant for me. It was when I first realized there was a misalignment between the skateboarding community and the skate industry.

The 2016 study started with a focus into why it was so difficult for local-owned skate shops to stay open, but it actually turned into this idea of community vs. corporate. Even though the local skate shop is a business, it still represents a presence, voice, and support system for skateboarders in any given community. Skate shops recycle and donate setups, they’ve always been a safe space for kids, I’ve even seen it used as a support system for sobriety in my hometown.

Then you have corporate skate shops, like Zumiez, that came in with all their money and made shopping for skateboards cheaper and more convenient for non-skaters. The problem is that Zumiez doesn’t then take that money and provide resources to the skaters. No, they build parks in empty parking lots for a weekend (Zumiez Couch Tour), sell you shit for more profits, then tear the park down at the end of the weekend and leave us there with just another empty parking lot to get kicked out of later. To this day, Zumiez has never sponsored a single skater.

So you have skateboarders participating and spending money on a sport, but that isn’t translating into resources for the skateboarders. That money is leaving the skateboarding community and lining the pockets of one single person who has never stood on a skateboard, living in who knows where. No one was advocating to change anti-skate laws and no one was building parks, so no one was buying new gear regularly.

Just because we’re not buying gear, doesn’t mean we’re not skating. It means we’re not being challenged. That is what I mean when I say a misalignment. The lens through which industries make assumptions can be extremely debilitating when making decisions on behalf of communities they aren’t a part of. They assumed that participation rates were decreasing and that women just weren’t into skateboarding, but it really came down to their lack of investment back into recreational skateboarding and accessibility as a whole.

What really fucked me up about that paper is that I started seeing this relationship everywhere in my hometown, on a much larger scale. It wasn’t just local skate shops vs. corporate skate shops. All independent and local-owned businesses were struggling because big chains had the financial resources to be located in more centralized spaces of a town. We spend money, it leaves our communities, and the members of that community are left with little more than minimum wage and few real opportunities for growth.

I was so mad, and that’s how the SPCC Project was born!

You’re also the founder of SPCC Project, right? What’s that all about and how did it begin?

Originally, The SPCC project was another paper that I wrote in 2017 in response to what I learned in the 2016 assessment. It was basically my vision for a solution to the problem I explained above. What amazed me about skateboarding is that despite the amount of strain corporations were having on resources, we still skated, built our own parks, we still filmed, and preserved what it means to be a skater. Skate culture was thriving and I wanted to translate how it was done, to work for entire communities across the country.

I came up with an elaborate system that could translate the universal experiences of skate park culture (including through the perspective of gender), into a community center that modeled a circular economy on the local level.

So that was the business model that the 2016 research paper turned into. Then I was like, shit, this sounds crazy. No one is going to buy into this abstract concept… I have to test it. Immediately after that, I moved to Brooklyn and started testing this business model to see if it was, not only profitable, but to see if it was something people even wanted.

That is the SPCC Project most people know of and is showcased on Instagram. It was essentially 2 years (up until 2020) of hosting these huge and ridiculously complex, interactive events on my rooftop. It was all about using my breakdown of skatepark culture (shared resources and positive competition) to generate opportunities for financial or social growth among a range of creative communities.

I was trying to figure out if I could create a stream of income using only the money we earned during the event, use it to cover expenses, pay everyone who participated in making the event happen, and still have enough left over to increase the production budget for the next event. All without using a single sponsor. The first one was definitely the toughest, mistakes were made and documented. It was always the amount of support I received after the events that made me think it was still possible. The people I met through that experience are really the ones who made it happen and taught me everything I needed to know.

We ended up hosting at least 5 major events, a number of smaller events, coordinated live events for local-owned restaurants in my neighborhood and were even invited to curate a show for Miami Art Basel in 2018. In those 2 short years, we created over 200 paid opportunities for freelance creatives and organically formed a network of over 600 creatives and start-ups in Brooklyn. Those experiences definitely became a family event for many of us.

Now, with this new research, The SPCC Project is coming back to its roots. I’m planning to create the SPCC experience in digital form. The goal is to develop a space in skateboarding that replicates skatepark community and culture in a post-pandemic world. I have the blueprints mapped out and I’m ready to bring it to the recreational skate community.

We survived corporations and the fashion industry. Now I want to see skateboarding stand on its own.

Interview: Sarah Huston