The #GenderEqualOlympics Are Historic — But The Games (Still) Aren’t Close To Fair

After a three-hour ride to a lake outside the Olympic Village, teams of rowers from around the world stepped off their buses, in need of a bathroom break before they took to the water to train. The Korean women’s team was first in line for the portaloos— until athletes from another country’s men’s team cut in front of them. 

“It was as though the women weren’t even there,” recalls former rower and Olympian Angela Schneider, who went on to win silver for Canada at those games, and is now director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at Western University in London, Ont., Canada. “I was so angry. A group of us female athletes tried to knock over the [portaloo] with the first guy in it. We weren’t successful, but we gave it a good shake.”

This was back at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Forty years later, women aren’t so easily ignored in the sporting world. Attitudes have changed since the ’80s, when only 23% of athletes competing in LA were women, and rowing was considered a men’s sport (“People used to call us ‘sir,’” Schneider recalls). In fact, the Paris 2024 Games will make history as the very first “gender-equal” Olympics: Out of the 10,500 athletes competing, there will be an even split between men and women.

The IOC seemed pretty pleased with itself back in March when it announced (just ahead of International Women’s Day, of course) this “monumental achievement,” dubbing Paris the #GenderEqualOlympics. “We are about to celebrate one of the most important moments in the history of women at the Olympic Games, and in sport overall,” IOC president Thomas Bach proclaimed. (An Olympics logo designed for the milestone — featuring a stereotypically feminine face, lipstick included — has riled the internet, with widespread memes that it would better suit a dating app.)

But even though this year’s even split of men and women athletes marks progress, there’s still a lot of “portaloo shaking” left to do. Tokyo 2020 was also celebrated for its 48% (almost) gender parity. Now, four years later, all we have to show for progress is another 2%. It’s kind of hard to get excited about a hashtag when we’ve heard it all before.

“The IOC is pretty good at tooting its own horn, and at every games we see a version of this celebration of gender equality,” says Dunja Antunovic, assistant professor of sport sociology at the University of Minnesota, and co-author of Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women’s Sports. “It’s not new.”

And it’s not the only part of the story. Having equal numbers of men and women athletes at the games doesn’t mean that we’ve magically solved the complex issue of gender equality in sports. “There are still inequalities in terms of the opportunities that are available to women athletes internationally, how certain sports are covered in the media, and the fact that many gender stereotypes still exist,” Antunovic says. Media coverage of women’s sports seldom exceeds 10% of total sports coverage, women’s sponsorship deals are a fraction of men’s — and just look at the uniforms women are often expected to wear. 

The latter most recently made headlines during controversy over Nike’s high-cut track and field leotards for Team USA. On Instagram, Lauren Fleshman, former pro runner and author of the book Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, called them “a costume born of patriarchal forces that are no longer welcome or needed to get eyes on women’s sports.” 

American hurdler and Olympian Queen Harrison Claye joked, “Hi @europeanwax would you like to sponsor Team USA for the upcoming Olympic Games!? Please and thanks.” (When Refinery29 contacted Nike for comment, a spokesperson said they stood by the brand’s previous official statement, that the uniforms “offer athletes a range of silhouettes tailored for various sport disciplines, body types and sizes, prioritising performance and maximum breathability.”)

We’ll give the IOC some credit for trying to change the narrative with a recent update to its media portrayal guidelines — framed as a way to “help ensure gender-equal, fair and inclusive coverage.” The update includes a call to journalists to focus less on women’s appearance and more on their performance — guidelines that are, sadly, still necessary. While analysing prime-time media coverage from the first week of the Tokyo 2020 Games, the Representation Project, a US-based gender justice group, found that women athletes were roughly 10 times more likely to be objectified by camera angles than men. Women were also seven times more likely in media coverage to be described in “gender diminutive” language, like being called a “girl.”

Black women in sports are treated especially horribly; misogynoir is rampant in sports media (in all media, frankly). This is a point expertly raised by former Refinery29 writer Ineye Komonibo in her 2021 review of Naomi Osaka’s Netflix documentary: “Being thrust into the spotlight of the court often comes with enough cons to turn one’s very dream into a nightmare,” Komonibo writes of the experience of Black women athletes. “Not even being the best in the game can save them from being picked apart. Before they are champions, they are Black women, and that makes them prime targets for a vicious cycle of abuse and harassment even with titles and trophies and world records behind them.”  

Adds Antunovic, the assistant professor of sport sociology, “During the Olympics, we often see commentary about athletes that highlights certain traits based on race, such as strength in relation to Black women athletes, and hard work in relation to Asian American women athletes.” Journalists who cover the games need to convey the complexity in women’s identities, paths, and performances, she says, instead of reducing them to singular characteristics around gender and race.

Inclusive language is one thing; inclusion itself is another. Another strategy the IOC has used to address gender inequality at the games has been to boost women’s participation by increasing the number of mixed-gender sports, like triathlon, and adding sports that historically excluded women, particularly combat sports. For instance, women’s boxing (finally) debuted in 2012 — and, as a result, 20-year-old Alyssa Mendoza from Caldwell, ID, will be taking her shot at an Olympic medal in Paris for Team USA. 

“I think that sometimes the hard work that women boxers do gets discredited, and so I’m really glad we have this platform where we can show our skills,” says Mendoza. Even so, she still gets the occasional “Oh, you’re a female boxer? You’re going to mess up your pretty face!” comment, but she uses those moments to clear up misconceptions. “Boxing isn’t like a Rocky movie,” she says. “It’s not bloody and gory and dangerous. It’s a beautiful sport.”

Beyond stereotypes around certain disciplines, the inherently gendered nature of most elite sports — that is, women and men competing separately — means that athletes who don’t fit neatly into the binary face barriers to participation. The IOC allows individual sports governing bodies to set their own policies for trans athletes, for example, and at least 10 Olympic sports, including cycling, rugby, and rowing, restrict trans athletes from competing. In 2021, the IOC announced a framework laying out its principles for athlete inclusion and non-discrimination, including its stance that athletes should be allowed to compete in the category that aligns with their self-determined gender identity. But the framework is non-binding, so how much real progress we’ll see remains an open question.

The world of sport is rife with gender bias, regardless of which gender you happen to identify with. Paris 2024 will be the first year that men’s teams are eligible to compete in artistic swimming (formerly called synchronised swimming), for instance. Athlete Megumi Field has chatted with her team about how cool it is to be competing in a so-called gender-equal Olympics, but is quick to flag the derision that the men she trains with have faced. “This is not just a ‘girl’s’ sport,” she says. “For us, gender equity conversations are also around the importance of including men.”

Although 28 out of 32 sports will be fully gender-equal in Paris, many disciplines are still characterised as “men’s sports,” and there are lingering discrepancies based on the age-old belief that women are the weaker sex. For instance, at the Olympics women can compete in the seven-event heptathlon, but not the 10-event decathlon, which remains for men only. (In 2021, Jordan Gray, the US record-holder in the women’s decathlon, launched a petition in favor of adding the event to the Olympics — she has received more than 30,800 signatures so far.) The idea that women athletes are “lesser than” is a problem that exists everywhere in sport, and at every level — it’s still not a good thing to be told “you throw like a girl.”

Women also remain underrepresented at the Olympics’ decision-making level: Only 33% of IOC executive board members are women (and only one is a woman of colour, as far as we can see on the IOC webpage, where the organisation’s comms person directed us). And there are far more men coaches and commentators across international networks. True equality won’t exist until it extends beyond the playing field, the pitch and the pool, and into places like sport administration, management, and coaching. That’s where true power lies and where true change can happen. “That’s where policy is made, and that’s where athletes’ lives are directly affected on the front lines,” says Schneider. It’s up to professional leagues and international governing bodies to support the push for more systemic change. 

In taekwondo, which debuted as an exhibition (non-competition) sport in 1988, there’s already parity in the number of men and women participants. “Our sport is ahead of its time because there are not many differences between genders,” says Faith Dillon, who trains in North Carolina and, at 20, is about to compete in her first Olympics. “The pay is equal, we have the same number of weight divisions, the qualification process is the same, we compete on the same days, and we have the same fan base.” 

Still, that doesn’t mean women taekwondo athletes have it easy. One of the biggest disparities between men and women in the sport comes down to physiology: It’s harder for women to cut weight, which can lead to disordered eating. And competing during your period is also an issue, Dillon says, not just because menstruating can cause natural weight fluctuations (she adds that some female athletes have chopped their hair off before a competition out of desperation), but because their uniforms are white. “For a while they talked about giving us black uniforms to use if we were menstruating, but then it would just be a signal that we had our periods, so it didn’t happen.” 

Recognising that women should be able to focus on winning and not the fact that they’re menstruating is slowly happening elsewhere in sport. During the 2023 World Cup, several countries, including the US, stopped kitting their women’s teams out in white shorts, and at Wimbledon women athletes were allowed to wear dark shorts under their tennis whites for the first time in the tournament’s history (as long as the shorts weren’t longer than their skirts).

Dillon says getting her period during a competition is just one more thing she has had to worry about — and push through. But what has helped keep her committed is the inspiration offered by the women she looked up to as a kid — many of whom she will now be competing against in Paris. “It’s surreal, and a little intimidating, because these are the women who helped me become who I am today,” says Dillon.

Because ultimately, more women athletes at the Olympics means more women winning — and more women playing sports. Change is happening, and we’ve seen the difference a few decades can make. The sports bra wasn’t even invented until the 1970s, and doctors once believed that women were physiologically incapable of running long distances — or, if they did, their uteruses would fall out. Finally, at the 1984 Olympics in LA, women were allowed to compete in marathon running at the games for the first time (uteruses intact). 

When American runner Joan Benoit Samuelson won gold at those games, her accomplishment inspired generations of athletes after her — among them Emily Sisson, who raced the 10k at Tokyo 2020 and holds the current American record in the women’s marathon. “It’s women like Joan who gave girls and women like me the belief that ‘Well, maybe I can do that, too,’” says Sisson, who will race the marathon in Paris. “We just need to grow the platform and give female athletes more opportunities to succeed and share their stories.”

Yes, gender parity in Paris is a sign of progress. But we’re still far from the finish line in the race to full equality, both at the games and in the larger world of sport. Only then can we truly embrace #GenderEqualOlympics — let’s just hope it doesn’t take us another 40 years to get there.