Cyclesmith ex-employees allege unfair treatment, culture of “mundane misogyny”

Antonia Chircop can pinpoint the moment her fears about how she was seen and treated by Cyclesmith’s management were confirmed: She was in a closed-door meeting with two of the north end bike shop’s senior managers. In the weeks leading up to the meeting, Chircop—a cycling enthusiast who’d joined the company as a sales associate in January 2021—had voiced concerns to Cyclesmith’s leadership about the bike shop’s alleged practice of profiling customers by their gender without their knowledge or consent. That, she feels, got her into hot water with the company’s higher-ups.

“If you think there’s a target on your back, it’s because there is,” she recalls one manager telling her in the Feb. 25, 2022 meeting.

The words frightened Chircop. So did her following interactions with Cyclesmith’s brass. In the ensuing weeks, Chircop says she was repeatedly “dragged aside” by supervisors and confronted for being “unproductive” and “ruining” Cyclesmith’s efficiency—none of which, she tells The Coast by phone, was true.

“That’s when I realized it wasn’t a safe space to work,” she says.

Chircop isn’t alone in her claims. The aspiring bike mechanic is one of three former Cyclesmith employees—all women—who allege that during their employment, they experienced a culture of “mundane misogyny,” disproportionate scrutiny relative to their male colleagues and a lack of promised on-the-job training or opportunities. The three further allege that Cyclesmith required its employees to complete lengthy training sessions without proper compensation—and describe a “hostile” workplace out of step with the company’s public-facing image as a “responsible employer” and “active community leader.”

None of the claims against Cyclesmith have been tested in court, nor with the Nova Scotia Labour Standards Division. The Coast has spoken with each of the three former employees, as well as Cyclesmith’s ownership, to get an insight into what happened inside the Agricola Street bike shop—and what comes next.

‘Overwhelming sense that I was unwelcome’

Hannah Estabrook joined Cyclesmith as a sales associate on Sept. 1, 2022. An outdoor guide, competitive athlete and lifelong cyclist, Estabrook felt like she was a natural fit for the job—and says she’d never been more motivated to prove herself in a role. She’d grown up in Halifax near Quinpool Road and still remembers the bike shop from its old location at the corner of Quinpool and Vernon Street. She’d heard about Cyclesmith’s living wage policy—introduced in 2021—and thought highly of what she’d seen of the company in the press. (The Coast, for example, profiled Cyclesmith in the fall after readers voted it Best Bike Store for the 10th straight year in our annual Best of Halifax awards.)

“I had the perception that they were a very progressive workplace, a very pro-worker business that supported the rights of their workers and treated them fairly and was welcoming to all identities,” she tells The Coast. Instead, she found that her experience at Cyclesmith was “quite the opposite.”

Estabrook was used to male-dominated workplaces. Cyclesmith, she says, was on a different level: Across all of Cyclesmith’s roughly 30 employees at the time, Estabrook says she was one of four women; all of the rest—including the company’s entire management team—were men. “It was very apparent that there was a stark gender imbalance… I had never seen anything like it.” (Speaking by phone with The Coast, Cyclesmith owner Andrew Feenstra calls those numbers “obviously wrong.” He counters that of the bike shop’s 38 staff today, about 20% would identify as non-male—and that each member of the staff he’s spoken with is “very happy to be here.”)

For Estabrook, that gender gap manifested itself in ways large and small, she says—from the difference in how she saw her male colleagues treated compared to her and her female peers, to more trivial things like the availability—or lack thereof—of staff uniforms.

Cyclesmith staff had two options for work attire, Estabrook tells The Coast: A company polo shirt or a branded fleece sweater. Estabrook recalls many of her male colleagues having both. Some, she says, owned multiples. But as an “average height” woman—“I’m five-foot-five,” she tells The Coast—Estabrook couldn’t get a company sweater in her size, and she wasn’t permitted to wear a sweater of her own. She says management promised her one would be coming soon, but in her three months at Cyclesmith, it never arrived. She doesn’t know if they ever ordered one.

“Every week that I worked there, I was freezing cold on the job,” she recalls.

Feenstra counters that supply-chain issues mean it’s difficult to ensure Cyclesmith has a constant supply of every size required. He adds that Cyclesmith heats its building, and that it’s not uncommon for staff to wear polo shirts alone, even in winter.

Beyond her experience with Cyclesmith’s uniforms, Estabrook describes the company’s work environment as one of “mundane misogyny.” Both she and Chircop say they would regularly witness their male colleagues enjoying freedoms that they and their female colleagues couldn’t—whether it was chatting on the sales floor or arriving late for shifts. That attitude extended to management, Estabrook tells The Coast. One manager, she says, wouldn’t look her in the eyes and only spoke with her when she was “in trouble.” This lasted throughout her employment, she says: It “just kind of created this sense that I was unwelcome and that I didn’t belong.”

The Coast asked Feenstra whether any efforts were made to improve employees’ sense of belonging—and if any efforts were made to address Estabrook’s concerns.

“I obviously can’t comment on how people feel,” he says, calling Estabrook’s and her peers’ allegations “vindictive”: “There seems to be no issue for some women. But [with] other women, it seems to be an issue.”

‘I needed to prove myself as a woman in that workplace’

To make up for feeling unwelcome, Estabrook poured herself into her work shifts. “I’ve never worked harder to impress an employer,” she says. She would restock shelves in between helping customers. Label products. Spend her off-work hours researching bikes. In quieter moments at work, she’d brush up on her knowledge of Cyclesmith’s inventory. The efforts paid off in her sales: During one banner shift, she sold a $17,000 bike to a client—a figure she says is more money than she earned during the entirety of her three-month employment. “I felt that I really needed to prove myself to them… I needed to prove myself as a woman in that workplace.”

Estabrook says she enjoyed “great” working relationships with many of her male colleagues, but at times, she would notice coworkers questioning her judgement and knowledge of bike mechanics. Some staff members, she says, would double-check her work. At times, male colleagues would step in to perform tasks she felt fully capable of doing.

She shared her concerns about Cyclesmith’s gender imbalance and its effects in an email to Feenstra on Oct. 26, 2022: “I also have to admit that I don’t really feel comfortable approaching my managers to have a vulnerable conversation,” Estabrook writes, nearly two months into her job. “As one of few women in a largely male-dominated workplace, it can feel very intimidating and a bit uncomfortable at times … I’m not trying to say this is anyone’s fault—I appreciate that everyone has different identities and personalities—but it is a reality of gender imbalance in the workplace.”

In an emailed reply to Estabrook on Oct. 27, 2022, Feenstra writes that he and his leadership team have “had many chats and meetings” with Cyclesmith’s female employees “to help change the attitudes of both our male staff and what the public thinks of us.” He notes that “17% of our staff is female”—a figure he cites as better than the industry average of 8%. “We have a ways to go, no question, but we are getting better,” Feenstra writes. In response to Estabrook’s concerns about her colleagues overstepping, he assures her that “I’m sure the staff have only wanted to help you, and make sure you are successful as possible when helping customers.” He further encourages her to “chat with any member if they are getting in the way, as we want to embrace feedback.”

The response felt dismissive to Estabrook.

“He essentially tried to deny my complaint,” she says. “He very much just brushed it off saying, you know, ‘We welcome everyone here. And if you’ve experienced misogyny, you should just stand up for yourself and tell people and nobody intended that.’”

Feenstra says he doesn’t remember the correspondence. He adds that part of Cyclesmith’s training process involves “staff helping other staff,” and it wouldn’t have been uncommon for a coworker to lend another colleague a hand or offer feedback.

‘A constant atmosphere of anxiety’

Estabrook and Chircop aren’t the only ex-Cyclesmith employees who feel they were treated unfairly. Arena Thomson Alamino joined the bike shop’s sales team in Dec. 1, 2021 but was fired a month later, on Jan. 12, 2022. It was her second job in the cycling industry: She’d also worked for a year as a cashier at a bike shop in Toronto. She says she’d been up-front in her interview with Cyclesmith that she would need some on-the-job training to help with her technical knowledge of the store’s products—of which there were many. That wasn’t an issue, she recalls management assuring her. But she soon found the reality to be different.

From the start, Thomson Alamino was popular with colleagues. She worked hard, she was personable and a quick learner. (“Everyone liked her,” Chircop tells The Coast.) But it wasn’t long into her tenure before she found herself being called into meetings with management.

“Why aren’t you selling bikes?” Thomson Alamino recalls being asked. That surprised her on three fronts: For one thing, Cyclesmith floor staff didn’t work on commission—“In my mind, I was doing a good job because my customers seemed completely fine and happy with the service I provided,” she tells The Coast. It was also early in December, a typical lull for bike sales. Plus, Thomson Alamino says, she still hadn’t received any on-the-job training for selling Cyclesmith’s products. She’d been waiting for her manager to show her the ropes.

“I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t putting in that time,” she says. The store seemed quiet enough to spend a few hours on training instead of waiting for walk-in customers. “It seems like such an obvious part of onboarding an employee if you want them to succeed… especially when you have advertised and made clear to them that training will be available to them.”

Thomson Alamino says she worked harder than she ever had to acclimate to Cyclesmith’s demands. Despite that, she describes a “constant atmosphere of anxiety” looming over her interactions with the company’s management. On one occasion in December 2021, she says a manager confronted her after she’d quietly expressed concerns about a colleague’s behaviour. A community member had been in the store and appeared to be under the influence. When they left, the coworker made eye contact with her, seemingly in reference to the departed customer, and then made a gun gesture with his fingers. It shocked and upset her. But in talking with management, she felt like her concerns were dismissed.

“‘At the end of the day, we’re a business,’” she recalls her manager saying. “It made it very clear to me that it’s not convenient for [staff] to have any opinions on social justice, or you know, generally just caring about people. You weren’t really allowed to have any sort of politics.”

That ran counter to the image Cyclesmith presented in public, she feels. The bike shop’s website touts the importance of “corporate social responsibility” and making decisions “that have a positive impact” throughout the community. “We want to be an inclusive, welcoming, diverse, and progressive business and employer,” the company’s hiring page reads.

Thomson Alamino, who describes herself as queer, says that during her time at the company, there were no other openly 2SLGBTQ+ staff members—and only one person of colour.

Feenstra tells The Coast that Cyclesmith is “trying to find more staff and more female staff, more non-binary staff. And we don’t hire based on that—we hire based on the ability to do the job.”

That doesn’t pass muster with Thomson Alamino: “How can you claim diversity when this is the reality of the environment you’ve created? These problems, they’re structural, and they’re pervasive.”

Diversity training and allegations of gender profiling

Cyclesmith has made efforts toward inclusivity. In an emailed statement to The Coast, Feenstra says Cyclesmith “believes in continuous improvement in all areas of the member experience, including inclusivity, and sensitivity.” In February 2022, the bike shop hired a team of consultants to lead staff in what Feenstra describes as “a store-wide equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility training seminar.” He says the company plans to do it again.

Chircop was at that February session. She says it was “phenomenal,” but she couldn’t help but notice that Cyclesmith management’s attention seemed to be elsewhere.

“It was so clearly obvious how much management thought that the training didn’t apply to them,” she tells The Coast. “Like, they were literally sitting on their phones and making calls and texting during the entire presentation.” She describes what she witnessed as “extremely rude” and defeating the point of the training: What use is an all-hands seminar if not every member is taking part?

(Speaking by phone with The Coast, Feenstra says Chircop’s recollections are “completely false.”)

Chircop recalls the seminar as “ironic,” given Cyclesmith’s business practices. She says the company would regularly file its customers’ genders in its sales database without their knowledge or consent—a practice done, according to an internal Slack memo, to “understand the numbers better” and make “educated decisions” about the company’s inventory.

According to the memo shared with The Coast, management recommended staff not to ask customers for their preferred gender identity, but instead to “use their judgement on how the customer presents.” Chircop says “a lot of people” on staff felt “very uncomfortable” with the practice. Two of her colleagues submitted anonymous recommendations to change it.

Feenstra agrees that the gender options in the company’s database could use changing: He tells The Coast that Cyclesmith is “reviewing” its policies, and that management has been “trying to figure out the best way to deal with it.”

But when Chircop voiced her concerns to management, she felt singled out.

“Who do you think you are? Do you think you’re going to save the world through Cyclesmith?” she recalls one manager asking her in a Feb. 25, 2022 closed-door meeting.

Feenstra says he “can’t comment” on a meeting he wasn’t in and “doesn’t know that specific conversation.” But Chircop says she referenced it specifically to him in her resignation letter, four days after the closed-door meeting with management.

“I have never been treated or spoken to in such an unprofessional and disrespectful manner,” she writes in the letter. “There is an opportunity for Cyclesmith to sensitize management to actively respect diversity.”

Concerns about unpaid labour

Both Estabrook and Thomson Alamino voiced concerns to The Coast around unpaid training they say was expected of Cyclesmith staff. In Estabrook’s job offer email—which The Coast has reviewed—she was briefed on a series of four online training modules that all new employees were expected to complete. (The modules are “a huge part of our onboarding with new staff,” Cyclesmith’s offer email reads.) But when she followed up by asking whether Cyclesmith would compensate her for her training time, she was told it would be unpaid: Instead, staff receive a “$100 bonus” after completing their training and finishing their three-month probationary period.

The time commitment—and the lack of compensation—concerned Estabrook.

“I’m a full time student; I’m working 20 hours a week. I don’t have a lot of extra time,” she says.

Nova Scotia’s Labour Standards Code doesn’t make explicit reference to compensation for training time, instead stipulating that “employees must be paid for their work.” But Canada’s Labour Code is more explicit: “In general, an employee is performing ‘work’ when the employee is on any trial period or training required by the employer,” it reads.

Estabrook expressed doubts in her reply about her capacity to undertake unpaid training. (“I just want to be certain that I can make space in my schedule to complete the modules on time before committing,” she writes in an Aug. 24, 2022 email.) Feenstra assured her in an Aug. 25, 2022 email that the online training “is pretty simple” and that the modules “go pretty quick” and are “very informative and fun to watch.”

That doesn’t match Estabrook’s experience: She estimates that she spent more than 20 hours on the training modules and still hadn’t completed them all. The same was true for Thomson Alamino. Each module, she says, involved a quiz portion. If a participant didn’t get 100% of the answers correct, they failed. (In an emailed statement to The Coast, Feenstra revises his earlier estimate and says the modules “on average take approximately 12.25 hours to complete.”)

Estabrook shared her concerns with Feenstra in an Oct. 20, 2022 email, writing that she was “led to believe that it would not be an onerous task,” and that it seemed “a very clear violation of workplace rights” for the training hours not to be compensated. “It seems misaligned with Cyclesmith’s values,” she told Feenstra. She recommended that either Cyclesmith pay its employees their full wage for the training modules or make them optional. Estabrook says she was offered a deal in return: She could stop the training modules, but in exchange, she would forfeit her employee discount, Cyclesmith’s RRSP matching policy and other staff perks—including fee reimbursement for any races or competitions she entered.

“I didn’t bring it up with my other coworkers,” she tells The Coast. “I felt pretty ashamed because of how I’d been treated… I started to feel like a second-class employee.”

Feenstra tells The Coast that after receiving a concern from one employee about the practice—he doesn’t name Estabrook—Cyclesmith “followed up immediately with our legal counsel on fair work practices” and “made immediate changes” to the policy. “At the time, we believed we were being fair,” he tells The Coast. Feenstra stresses that “all mandatory employee training time at Cyclesmith is paid time,” and that wages, health-care benefits and paid sick days are “not linked to these optional training modules in any way.”

Just over a month later, on Nov. 29, 2022, Cyclesmith rolled out its updated company-wide policy on training—which The Coast has reviewed. While no longer mandatory, the online modules fall under Cyclesmith’s “discretionary team incentive program,” which includes company bonuses, a group RRSP program, in-store discounts and race reimbursement. “All of these incentives,” the policy states, “will only be granted to team members who have completed and maintained the online learning goals outlined.”

A day after the company’s new policy was introduced, on Nov. 30—the last day of her probation—Estabrook was fired.

“You’re just not a good fit here,” she recalls management telling her.

‘I felt horrible about myself’

The firing came as a shock to Estabrook. In time, it also rang familiar: It was the same explanation given to Thomson Alamino when she was fired on Jan. 12, 2022.

“I was never offered an indication that my work performance was lacking. I was never told that there was something I should improve on,” Estabrook says. The incident, she adds, took her weeks to emotionally recover from. “I felt horrible about myself.”

Thomson Alamino recalls the “sense of shame” she felt in the weeks and months after her dismissal. She’d never been fired before—and hasn’t been fired since.

“There was basically nothing I wouldn’t have done in order to keep that job,” she says. “I felt like it was completely unfair… I knew that they didn’t like me for whatever reason, in spite of my best efforts.”

Feenstra tells The Coast that Cyclesmith is an “open business,” and while he “can’t speak for how people feel,” some of the claims made about the bike shop were from former employees with brief tenures: “So they don’t really understand how the business worked… and unfortunately, they weren’t a good fit in the team.”

Cyclesmith calls allegations a ‘smear campaign’

The first report of complaints about Cyclesmith’s workplace conditions came in a Rank and File article on Feb. 21, 2023. In an emailed statement to The Coast, Feenstra calls the claims of misogyny and sexism at Cyclesmith “unfounded.” He adds that, although the cycling industry “does skew disproportionately to males,” Cyclesmith “continues to strive for an equal and inclusive working environment.”

In further conversations with The Coast, he calls the allegations a “smear campaign” by “disgruntled employees.” He reiterates that Cyclesmith is a “relatively successful business in Halifax trying to make a go of it” and that all of the staff he’s spoken with are “infuriated” by the allegations: “They weren’t asked about their experiences here.”

That response doesn’t hold water with Chircop. She counters that she’s received messages of support from “a dozen” current and former Cyclesmith employees since going public with her story. “I fear for the well-being of the staff at Cyclesmith who are too afraid to speak because they saw how we were treated,” she adds.

Feenstra says “we make mistakes for sure, and we correct them,” but he calls the claims “completely off mark.”

None of the women who spoke with The Coast say they’re looking for compensation—instead, their aim is to raise awareness.

“I think many people assume that misogyny at work doesn’t happen anymore,” Estabrook says. Chircop calls Cyclesmith’s workplace culture “a serious issue” that has “gone unaddressed for years—and it has real-world implications.

“I want a deep-hearted, meaningful apology for how they treated me—treated all the women,” she adds.

This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2023.