Over a hundred years after Paris 1900 gave women a go at the Summer Games, the French capital promises to host the first gender-equal Olympics. For the XXXIII Olympiad in 2024, half of the 10,500 Olympians will be women, a slight rise from Tokyo 2020’s 47.8 per cent.
Women will also account for 40 per cent of technical officials, up from 30 per cent in Japan.
The 1900 Games had a measly 2.2 per cent – 22 out of 997 athletes – of women participants, and progress was sluggish until London 2012, grandly dubbed ‘The Women’s Games’, when every participating country finally had female athletes.
“We are about to celebrate one of the most important moments in the history of women at the Olympic Games and in sport overall. This is our contribution to a more gender-equal world,” International Olympic Council president Thomas Bach said on this year’s International Women’s Day on March 8.
The IOC’s bid for equality doesn’t stop with the athletes, as the organising body has cooked up a more balanced sports programme, with 28 of the 32 sports in Paris achieving full gender parity. Even the medal events are showing signs of fairness, with 152 for women, 157 for men, and 20 mixed-gender events.
According to the United Nations’ Global Gender Gap Report 2023, the gender gap across 146 countries is now 68.4 per cent closed. But equal representation between men and women in the economic, political, health, and education sectors is still 131 years away at the current rate of progress. Meanwhile, India, ranked 127th in last year’s report, has managed to close 64.3 per cent of the overall gender gap.
At this Olympics, India will have 46 women athletes, making up 41 per cent of the squad. At Tokyo 2021, the country had 53 women athletes among 120 participants. Eight of India’s 20 medals from six Olympics since the turn of the century have been won by women.
Women athletes, however, have always had to wade through a swamp of negative publicity and vitriol which social media has only exacerbated. During the Tokyo Olympics, 87% of online abuse on Twitter was targetted at female athletes, according to a study commissioned by World Athletics. The IOC, in a bid to safeguard athletes from online abuse, will implement an AI-powered monitoring system during the Paris Games. Developed in collaboration with the IOC’s Athletes’ Commission and the Medical and Scientific Commission, the system will monitor posts on all major social media platforms in 35+ languages in real-time and report abusive content to social media platforms.
Despite all these efforts, it’s still far from a level playing field.
Only 13 per cent of coaching positions at the Tokyo Games were held by women, and the IOC’s executive board boasts a mere 33 per cent of women. According to a 2018 UNESCO study, while 40 per cent of athletes are women, their events receive a pitiful four per cent of global sports coverage. A 2023 study by The Collective found that women’s sports get just 15 per cent of total sports media coverage in the US. Even we at Sportstar aren’t exempt from this skew. Only two of our 15 covers this year featured female athletes. Last year, it was eight out of 34.
Progress is inching forward, but let’s hope it starts sprinting soon.
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