Her long brunette hair flows in the wind. She sports a form-fitting T-shirt that accentuates her lean, feminine frame. Her light blue jeans hug her slender body as she glides down the city street. Everyone she passes turns to look: they cannot help but notice the way she moves. Her DC shoes pound the pavement as she weaves in and out of a busy intersection on her Enjoi deck. She hocks a loogie and busts a frontside flip over a curb. No, this is not the girl next door. She is the girl bombing down the hills of San Francisco on four wheels. She is a female skater.

Women have been taking to the streets with the fellas since the early days of skating back in the sixties. Now, forty years later, women are still killing it on skateboards, sometimes even putting guys to shame. As competitive skateboarding remains a male-dominated force, it is often difficult for women to gain recognition. Although some professional female skaters grace the pages of skate magazines, their spreads appear much less often then their male counterparts. Just as everything evolves over time, the world of skating is ready for a female evolution that will mark a new chapter in the skate culture story.

Skateboarding as a sport and a culture has been manufactured over the years to embody a hardcore, masculine image, but it was not always this way. "In the early seventies, for both guys and girls, it was all about surfing on wheels," says Barbara Odanaka, who joined the Hobie amateur skate team in the seventies and who founded the International Society of Skateboarding Moms in April 2006. "Many of the girls, and plenty of guys, integrated gymnastic-type moves into their skating; it was all about grace, flow and style." During a time when skating was taking shape, girls were not only flying down hills, they were doing it tiptoed and with one leg in the air. "Plenty of girls skated aggressively, too, but most, like superstars Ellen O'Neal and Ellen Berryman, had a definite feminine, balletic style that was appreciated by the guys as much as the girls," says Odanaka.

It was not until later that the surf-proxy sport became geared towards the male gender and away from the girls. "Skateboarding became such a guy's sport through the eighties and nineties, and girls did what they could to fit in: they talked the talk, dressed like the guys, and some took on that tough, macho persona to fit in," says Odanaka. "As the sport morphed from surfing influence to something influenced by the punk music scene, in the eighties and nineties, well...it became a little like a slam pit. Not all the girls were cut out for that."

But in the competitive arena today, professionals still regard the sport's stylistic roots as praiseworthy. Only in recent years have women been given the opportunity to see their names on the scoreboard and show off their female-tailored style. In 1995, the X Games emerged as the action sport's Olympics; it was not until 2003 that the games recognized female skaters in a medal-winning bracket. "This year they offered equal prize money for men and women skating in the X Games [for the first time], which gives women a lot more incentive to be pushing the limits in skateboarding," says Erica Harris, who started the San Francisco chapter of Portland and Seattle based organization, Skate Like a Girl (SLAG).

"Women have been excluded from skate culture on many levels. I heard one woman say that they stopped letting her compete slalom because she was beating the men so it didn't look gnarly," says Harris.

"Over the past few years, because of organizations like Skate Like A Girl, more and more girls are coming out and getting involved," says Lizzie Lee, owner of Purple Skunk Board Shop. At 56, Lee started skating in the fifties when wheels were rock-hard and she and the boys were among the first to skate the hills of San Francisco. Her youthful eyes and childlike enthusiasm for the sport make her seem years younger; she seems as comfortable in her own skin as she looks in her sweatshirt and tennis shoes. "More girls are entering competitions and they are killing it," she adds.

Ladies may be participating more often in skate competitions, but they still remain scarce in skate media. The pages of a typical skateboard magazine are geared toward men, both through advertisements and content. In the two most recent issues of Skateboarder there are no women featured. In The Skateboard Mag the only female is Elissa Steamer, the most recognized woman and one of few spotlighted in the skating world. This begs the question: has lack of support stifled female participation or does the media merely reflect the fact that there are a small number of women skating at a professional level?

Skate shop owner Joel Jutagir thinks there are fewer female skaters because skating is typically not a female activity. "A guy doesn't care about the scars he has," jokes Jutagir, owner of the Pleasant Hill, California-based Metro skate shop, as he flashes his bruised shin under his slim-fit black denim. "I guess it's manly to be scarred."

Jutagir, who runs the Metro skate team, says in order to consider sponsoring female skaters the women need to exhibit the same drive as their male counterparts. "They don't have to be as gnarly as men," says the 34-year-old, "but they'll have to push themselves to their maximum capability."

He agrees that once the male and female skill-level is matched, they will be able to compete against one another in skate competitions. "There are women skaters out there that are better than men," he admits, "but now there are no women better than men that are at the pinnacle of their skill level."

San Francisco resident and professional skater Adrian Williams knows only one other female skateboarder in San Francisco. Williams, 26, met her several years ago when she was skating a local spot during her lunch break in business attire. "She basically wasn't looking like your everyday, or even off-day skateboarder," jokes Williams, who eventually befriended her.

While staring at the locals skating the Embarcadero, Williams reflects that the best compromise for female skaters in competition is to have their own separate bracket, but if they feel they have the skill to compete with male skaters than they should. "[Female skaters] deserve to be compared to how they want to be," he says. "Elissa Steamer has done some shit that I ain't gonna do. I definitely have done some shit that she ain't gonna do. So where's the difference?"

As Williams sits cross-legged, with a black hoodie draped over his head, he recognizes and acknowledges the absence of female skaters in the mainstream. "Skating is hella grimy and it's aggressive," he says as he reminds himself why there are not as many females skating as males. "It's not the girl's style. Sometimes you can get really fucked up."

There is no doubt that skateboarding can give way to some gnarly injuries. But the notion that men are the only ones willing to endure the scrapes and scuffs does not add up. With girls like twenty-one-year-old Terresina Polizzi who turns heads in a skirt and heels number and still bombs hills with the boys, there is no denying that they are out there.

Polizzi first started skating when she was nine years old. "Me and my friends were tomboys, we would be on bikes cruising around, trudging through puddles, but we got bored with that, we wanted something new. We actually got our first boards at Toy-R-Us," she says with a laugh as she recalls how the board "probably had an 8-ball design on the back of it." But by the time she was a junior in high school, she was dropping in on mini ramps and spending her summers hitting up skate parks with a crew of other skaters.

"I have inspired a lot of my girlfriends to skate, because I always have my board with me, I'm always pushing them to go faster," says Polizzi with genuine excitement in her voice. Her sun-kissed brown hair is pulled back and her tattered jean shorts show off a large skateboarding-induced scar on her left knee.

"I can be the girliest girl at times, but when it comes to skating, I'm obviously not gonna wear a dress, I mean, I have, when I want to go to work and I want to skate down the hill, I'll wear a dress and sneakers and change into heals when I get there," Polizzi says with a smile. Her board leans against the wall behind her; its underside bears the marks of a true skater. An image of Paris Hilton's face once graced the wooden panel but has been worn unrecognizable from sliding rails and shredding down city streets.

Like Polizzi, Jess Springer too can put it down with the best of 'em. Springer, 21, who was home-schooled while growing up in San Jose, says she took up skating ten years ago because there was not much to do in her hometown. Though Springer does not recall what drew her into skating, she knows that as soon as she got a feel for riding the four-wheeled beast she could not refrain from riding with the neighborhood kids. "Most kids couldn't skate as well as me," says Springer, who didn't mind being the only girl skating with a crew of guys, "so they didn't give me shit."

Now that Springer resides in San Francisco she says one thing she loves doing is bombing down hills throughout the city. "Skating is crazy," she says with a touch of admiration, "I'm always doing stuff that questions my ability."

Springer understands skating is a male-dominated sport, but she hopes to see more females tearing it up with dudes in the future. "Don't be discouraged from falling," she says to aspiring female skaters who may be intimidated. "Just know there are other chick skaters out there." [X]