This week I attended a webinar sharing the results of Veganuary’s participants survey for 2024. This is the survey that Veganuary sends out after the event to everyone who registered on their website. Veganuary estimate that a mindblowing 25 million people around the world gave up animal products during January this year and there were some fascinating statistics within the presentation (which I’ll likely do a podcast episode on soon!).
But one statistic really jumped out at me: out of all the people who officially signed-up to the Veganuary challenge, 85% were female (see chart above). It is not recognised nearly enough that veganism remains a female-led movement.
Coincidently this week, my wife Lisa and I were pushing our one year old daughter Awen around in the shopping cart at our local supermarket. And as we went around, one woman kept smiling at me. Now it obviously wasn’t my good looks but I was wearing my Vegan Tribe hoody, so I wondered if I’d simply been spotted by another vegan out and about. But looking slyly into her cart (as you learn to do when you think you’ve spotted another vegan in the supermarket) I saw that she had meat and dairy in there.
Eventually she came over to talk to us, and told me how jealous she was of us obviously being a vegan family – because she actually was vegan but she still had to prepare non-vegan food for her husband because he wouldn’t engage with her about veganism and she didn’t know what to do.
The Veganuary survey echoed this: people said finding vegan food and living vegan for the month wasn’t really a problem, participants found it a lot easier than they thought it would be. But what was hard, was dealing with family and friends who were not vegan. Social pressure from loved ones is now one of the main barriers to people turning vegan.
As vegan businesses, we’ve also got a part to play here. We need to ask what can we do as businesses to break down those social barriers – and if 85% of the people doing Veganuary identify as female, then we’ve really got to start working on those men!
David 💚🌱🐷
PS – Lisa advised she ditched her husband and came along to Vegan Camp Out to find a new vegan man 😅
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