U.S. Women Out-medalled Men at the Rio Olympics (and it’s not surprising anymore)
There’s not much known about the first female U.S. Gold Medalist. We know her name was Margaret Abbott. We know she was a naturalized American citizen, having been born abroad in Calcutta, British India, and living in Chicago, Illinois. We know she won the Women’s Golf Tournament in the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris. She liked art and golf. That’s about it.
What’s striking, though, is not how little we know about Margaret Abbott’s Olympic performance, but how little she knew about it. The 1900 Paris Olympics were so poorly organized and promoted, Margaret Abbott was never even told that the women’s tournament was an official Olympic event.
One-hundred-and-sixteen years later, Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles will have no such obscurity. Together they were — arguably — a bigger story than Michael Phelps this Olympics, and will likely command the attention of the next Olympics in Tokyo.
But you can hardly blame Margaret Abbott for not knowing about her own Olympic history-making. After all, women hadn’t even been allowed to compete in the previous Olympics in Athens. And one woman who ran the marathon anyway, Stamata Revithi, was neither recognized as a finisher, nor allowed inside the Stadium. After all, Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the International Olympic Committee, considered women athletes to be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect.”
Perhaps because of this attitude, women athletes faced an uphill battle for inclusion in the Olympics.
When Katie Ledecky and Simone Bilas were born in 1997, women and mixed events had only just inched up to 1/3 of all events. When celebrated Olympian Michael Phelps was born, men’s-only events were still over 70% of the Olympics.
But at Rio 2016, the top two medal-hauling countries in the games overall — the U.S. and China — both had more women medalists than men.
How did this happen?
Despite sluggish progress, women athletes slowly narrowed the gap at the Olympics. The 2016 Rio Olympics featured the closest-to-equal Olympics yet, where Women’s-only and Mixed Events made up 47% of all Olympic Events. Men’s-only Events made up 53%.
It’s easy to imagine a virtuous cycle at work. When countries see the highest pinnacle of athletics at the Olympics — and see their own men and women competing — it can change the way people think about women athletes in their own society. In turn, those athletes can inspire more young women and men to follow them, and can convince Olympic committees to support their pursuit of the sport.
This may be especially important in countries where women are seen as less-than-equal to men. The United Nations Human Development Report Office publishes an annual “Gender Inequality Index” score for each country. A lower “GII” denotes less inequality between genders in that country (more equality). A higher “GII” denotes more inequality.
Countries with a GII Score below 0.3 (more gender equality) tended to lie near a normal distribution around male and female medalists. 47% of their medals overall were won by women.
Countries with a GII Score above 0.3 (less gender equality) tended to fare much worse in women events — or sometimes didn’t have any women medalists at all. Only 27% of their medals overall were won by women.
The difference is pretty striking. It’s clear that if a country wants to make double the impact on the global sporting stage, embracing women athletes as more than “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect” might be the best way to start.
