The Paralympics lag behind on gender equality. Here's why.
The Paralympics lag behind on gender equality. Here's why.
"Gender equity has been seen as very divorced from the notion of disability justice."
Happy Paralympics day, Power Plays readers! The Games are officially underway in Paris. Over the next 10 days, 4,400 athletes will compete in 549 events across 22 sports for the sporting immortality of gold, silver, and bronze.
Of those 4,400 athletes, 1,983 are women, meaning women account for 45% of Paralympians this summer. This is a record number of women, which we love! However, when it comes to gender equality, the Paralympics still lag behind the Olympics, which almost reached gender parity in Paris earlier this month.
To take a deeper dive into the state of gender equality at the Paralympics, I spoke with an expert on the topic, Dr. Andrea Bundon, an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia who served as a guide for visually impaired skiers for Canada at the 2010 and 2014 Paralympics.
But before we get to that great conversation, let’s take a bit of a deeper dive into the numbers.
In this year’s Paralympics, two sports will actually have more women competing than men — Para equestrian, which has 61 women and 17 men, and Para powerlifting, which has 90 women and 89 men.
Para badminton, goalball, Para rowing, and wheelchair basketball all have an equal number of men and women.
That leaves 16 sports where there are more men competing than women.
Of those, two are particularly bad — football 5-a-side (blind soccer), which doesn’t have any women’s teams, and wheelchair rugby, which doesn’t have a women’s competition, but it is technically a mixed sport.
In Paris, only eight of the 96 rugby athletes are women — Australia has three women on its 12-person team, Germany has two, the United States, Denmark, and Japan all have one. (In wheelchair rugby, players are classified on a point system from 0.5 to 3.5 depending on arm and trunk restrictions. Four players are on the floor at a time, with a max point score of 8.0; however, the team gets an additional 0.5 points to play with for every woman on the court.)
There are so many reasons why the gender imbalance still exists! And thankfully, we have Dr. Bundon here to educate us on all of it, including the history of the movement, impairment distribution, the perils of the “mixed sport” designation, and the trope we should all avoid perpetuating when talking about the Paralympics.
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A Q&A with Dr. Andrea Bundon on ingrained sexism in the Paralympic movement
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Power Plays: Why do you think there's this discrepancy in opportunity for women in the Paralympics? Is this a problem with para sport overall, even on the grassroots level?
Dr. Andrea Bundon: It’s never just one thing, but there are some things that happen structurally that further entrench this discrepancy. The Olympics and Paralympics are related, but they are very different things. The Paralympics started in a military hospital, and military hospitals, certainly back then [in the 1940s] were mostly men.
As a result, there are more events for men on the program than for women, and there always have been. And it's easier to stay in the Paralympic program than to get added to the Paralympic program. So the new sports, they're pretty gender balanced, but there's some sports on the program that have been there a long time and, in my opinion, have been given a lot more leniency in terms of their efforts to include women in the program. So that’s part of it.
The other part of it is that disability is gendered in many different ways. We've got the stats around, for example, spinal cord injuries. Although it's not entirely the case that more men get spinal cord injuries than women, the rate of spinal cord injury is highest in young men, while spinal cord injury for women is often associated with older age. So there's some elements and of impairment distribution that are cited when you ask, “Why can’t you recruit more women?” You’ll hear, “Oh, there's just there's not as many available. We're dealing with a smaller pool of women.” That's not entirely true globally, more women than men have disabilities, but it is true when you start to look at certain impairment types, which are the impairment types that are more likely to be classifiable and on the Paralympic agenda.
PP: I’m wondering how much of the discrepancy is this ingrained history versus the ongoing sexism by the people in charge?
AB: I mean, it's definitely both. There's no doubt about it. But you are dealing with very different numbers games. You're not dealing with large pools of potential athletes to begin with, then you've got gender being one classification, and then you also have all the different impairment classifications. It becomes complicated. You want to, on one end, put on as few restrictions as possible so that the most number of people can participate and the most number of nations can actually field a team. There is some justification for not wanting o be overly restricted by saying you need to have exactly this number of female athletes. However, the other thing that I've seen happen is that the notion of gender equity has been seen as very divorced from the notion of disability equity or disability justice.
One of the things that I've been really interested in is how many countries do not have single female athlete on their team this year. There's going to be 170 nations competing. This is a big increase. This is one of the things you'll see the IPC announcing very proudly. They'll often talk about nations where disability is incredibly stigmatized, where having disabled people publicly represent your nation is still a huge, huge thing. And that's a really heartwarming story.
“How do we both encourage nations to be part of the Paralympic movement … and still hold them to account on other issues of social justice?”
But what you won't see them talking about is how many countries are not sending a single woman. Why are we not calling them out on this? Why is this not a big deal? If that happened at the Olympic Games, we know. Why are some countries allowed to continually not send a single woman to the Paralympic games?
Well, partially because we congratulate the country for their progressiveness towards a disability, and then are cautious about calling them out on not including disabled women. Those things are seen as very separate issues. How do we both encourage nations to be part of the Paralympic movement, to invest in disability sport to develop their disability sport pathways and still hold them to account on other issues of social justice?
[Ed. Note: By our count, 33 countries at the Paris Paralympics don’t have any women on their team; Bosnia and Herzegovina has the largest all-male delegation with 14 athletes, while 27 of the all-male countries only sent one athlete to Paris. Meanwhile, eight delegations only sent female athletes, with six of those only sending one athlete total and the other two sending two.]
PP: There's this chicken-egg phenomenon that we talk about within women's sports as a whole, especially with Olympic sports, of, it needs to be an Olympic sport for countries to invest in it, but the IOC won’t make it an Olympic sport unless enough countries have already invested in it. Does that happen for women in the Paralympic movement as well?
AB: That’s exactly what happens. There's a few things we came across in our research. And one is that when the IPC makes decisions about what's going on the Paralympic program, it doesn't seem like they often consider the impact this has on the grassroots, and the pathways in the Paralympics between grassroots and elite are short. Soccer could be eliminated from the Olympics, and there'd still be millions of people playing soccer worldwide. But when one of these programs gets cut from the Paralympics, that sport no longer exists in many communities.
Then specifically in relation to the women's participation element, this is where I think the use of a mixed sport becomes really, really interesting and important. In our research, we interviewed women as well as men and women coaching in sled hockey, which is listed as a mixed sport. In the last winter Paralympics, I think China was the only country that sent women, and it was just one woman. So it's a mixed sport with very little participation from women at the international level, and many of the athletes and coaches we spoke to felt like their efforts were actually being hampered by the fact that there is a mixed event. Because what they get told [from federations] is that they’re not funding a women’s team because they’re already funding a mixed team, even though no women are actually selected to the mixed team.
PP: Yeah, I wrote about this back in 2018 for sled hockey! One of the wildest things to me is that for sled hockey, the rules say the roster can have 17 people, but if you add a woman to your roster, you can have 18. So the woman doesn’t even have to take the roster spot of a man. And still, they’re not included.
AB: And then talk about how hard it is to be a woman on that team if you are included! We interviewed some of those women, and it's a really lonely experience to be the lone woman on a team. I was going back through some of our interview data recently, and one of the coaches was even talking about how if there are two very promising women players, they become seen as if they're in competition with each other, because only one of them is going to be selected to the national team, despite the fact that it is possible to select two or more women for the team. But these women are pitted against each other for that one roster spot. It's just incredibly lonely and alienating.
“Many of the athletes and coaches we spoke to felt like their efforts were actually being hampered by the fact that there is a mixed event.”
So we're actually seeing, in some cases, having a mixed sport on the program being counterproductive for women. While it was pitched as a pathway to build the women’s game and then eventually split off to have a men's and women's team, I have yet see any evidence that's happening.
PP: As we’re watching the Paralympics, is there anything that you want us want to either avoid or pay special attention to?
One of the things that comes up in my research is that tension between celebrating these athletes who are doing incredible things and putting on a real show, but also understanding that what you're seeing out there is not the reality of disability for many people. There’s this “super-crip” narrative, this idea that being a disabled athlete is about overcoming disability. That sounds like a really heroic story, but what it's perpetuating is a stereotype that disability is something tragic and negative to be avoided at all costs and overcome. And some of the research that talks about disabled people's perceptions of the Paralympic Games and the media coverage of the Paralympic games really speaks to how extremely alienating and lonely that rhetoric can be.
“Where's the place to acknowledge that disability is diversity, and to celebrate disability as part of the human experience?”
Where’s the disability pride? Where's the place to acknowledge that disability is diversity, and to celebrate disability as part of the human experience? There's some athletes who can really walk that line, and there's some media organizations that can as well, but a lot of the coverage that I expect to see will be really celebrating people who overcome disability, and not realizing how how offensive that really is.
A comment about sled hockey, which is now officially para ice hockey: World Para Ice Hockey is moving towards holding an official Women’s World Championship. They’re currently at the stage of running a Women’s World Challenge, with 4 teams (including a Team World, for athletes from countries that don’t yet have a national team). The first World Challenge was in 2022. They still need a few more national teams before a true world championship (rather than a world challenge) can become official, and I’m hopeful that soon, it’ll happen.
On a related note, I’d encourage anyone who has the opportunity to try out a hockey sled, whether you play stand-up hockey or use a wheelchair or other mobility device to get around. It’s a mental and physical challenge unlike anything else. As the saying goes, hockey is for everyone!