If you believe the hype from the International Olympic Committee, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics will be a “landmark in gender equality” and the ...
If you believe the hype from the International Olympic Committee, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics will be a “landmark in gender equality” and the “first gender-balanced games in history”.
The Olympics do not have a good track record when it comes to gender equality. At the end of the 19th century, when it was founded, the modern Olympic movement deliberately excluded women. Games patriarch Baron Pierre de Coubertin argued an Olympiad with women would be:
impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.
With the postponed 2020 Tokyo Games due to start next Friday, what advances can we celebrate? And what still needs to change?
We have come a long way
The Tokyo Games will feature the most female athletes at an Olympics, with 48.8% of competitors set to be women.
Noting this is actually shy of 50%, this is nonetheless up from 45% at the 2016 Rio Games and 44.2% at London 2012. At the Tokyo Paralympic Games, 40.5% of athletes will be women, compared to 38.6% at Rio.
To put this into a historical context, at the first modern games in Athens in 1896, women were banned from competing (although there are reports at leaset one woman ran the marathon).
At the 1900 Paris Olympics, women were allowed to compete, but they were only 22 out of 997 competitors. Women were also restricted to a select number of five...
