“If a shoe had been designed from a woman’s foot, would I be running without getting the injuries?”: running footwear needs and preferences of recreational and competitive women runners across the lifespan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite known sex and gender differences between males/men and females/women, most current running footwear is designed for and tested on males/men. This qualitative study aimed to explore the running footwear needs and preferences of recreational and competitive women runners and how these change across the lifespan. We conducted two semi-structured focus groups with women runners in Vancouver, Canada. Participants were purposively sampled for variation in age, running experience and running volume. Data analysis used an inductive reflective thematic approach. Twenty-one women runners (11 recreational, 10 competitive) of median (IQR) age 43 (20–70) years and median (IQR) running experience of 15 (6–58) years participated. Nine (43%) women had experience running during pregnancy or postpartum. Three main themes emerged regarding women’s running shoe needs and preferences: prioritising comfort and feel; the perceived contribution of the shoes to injury prevention; and the need for different shoes for different running contexts. Additionally, three main themes described how runners’ needs evolve across the lifespan: a shift from prioritising shoe style to comfort; increased shoe size and width during pregnancy/postpartum; and a growing preference for greater shoe stability and cushioning with age. Our results suggest that current running footwear does not fully meet the needs of women runners. Many women desired a wider toe box, a narrower heel cup and more cushioning, while competitive runners sought performance-enhancing features that did not compromise comfort. Women also strongly believed that footwear plays a critical role in injury prevention, highlighting the need for evidence-based education on this topic. These insights provide a foundation for the co-design of women-specific running shoes that better align with their unique biomechanical and performance needs. Future research should investigate whether sex-, gender- and life stage-specific shoe designs could enhance running performance, comfort and injury prevention for women across all levels of participation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".