I love the way folks can put out opinions and still be respectful.

I sent in my essay for "women who ride." All you had to do was send an essay, oh, and three photographs, so I would imagine they got ***lots and lots*** of applications. I noticed that the applications were due at the end of April... but entrants were supposed to be prepared to start their exciting year of touring and blogging... May 1.
I believe it was Mid-July before they made their selections - despite a couple of emails saying "we'll pick by ___" and it not happening. All the evidence says it was a committee of folks who may or may not have consciously considered The Diversity Question; if I remember right they made a point that they were looking for "all ages," and said stuff like whether we rode for a cause like environmentalism... which I considered could have been 'cause they wanted to weed those folks out
There were also some pretty fundamental flaws in their website about their "women's tour" - Illinois was an "eastern state" if you clicked on it... but the events were actually listed (oddly enough ) under the midwest, as just one example. That one they didn't fix; I emailed the contacts about it and at least one other, which they did fix. Their site is pretty consistently flawed (and then there's the content: "Ten best reasons to commute by bike," half of which involved having "fun" dodging heavy traffic, which of course is what *intimidates* people from commuting, so I'd have to call that one a marketing faux pas ).

So. IMO, they've got a marketing budget... but not particularly good *skills* in the craft.
When I saw who was picked (only because I kept going back to the site and probing and searching - *not* because they plunked it front and center or sent it out in their email right away) I thought, "wow... those folks are poster ladies... they're the Hallmark Channel STories of cycling." Then summer was over and I've been working a lot harder and surfing a lot less - but I have wondered whether the individuals would stay Hallmarky for the whole year... and whether they would actually gather a community around them or not. I did duly notice that they were all white folks, and figured it was the usual unconsciously homogenous thinking that steered things that way.
I agree that in a sense they are singing at the choir (not even preaching... but trying to *do* at us what we are already doing) as opposed to trying to make cycling look accessible to the masses. Reckon it's up to us to do that