The women the IOC's quest for gender parity left behind
Let's look beyond the quotas and platitudes.
Before International Women’s Day in March, the IOC sent out a press release about a “monumental achievement” in Paris 2024.
“The IOC has distributed quota places equally to female and male athletes – 50:50,” it said. “For the first time in Olympic history, there will be full gender parity on the field of play.”
This was, rightly, touted as a big deal. One hundred years ago, at the 1924 Paris Olympics, women only made up 4.4 percent of the competitors. Forty years ago, in 1984, that number had increased to 23 percent. Twenty years ago in Athens? Women accounted for 40 percent of the Olympians. Progress has been steady, incremental, and hard-fought at every turn.
But the IOC’s self-congratulatory press release still made me angry. While the IOC has made gender parity a goal in recent years, it is also the reason it took so long to get here in the first place.
And while the IOC technically set the quotas so that parity was possible, reality adds a few asterisks. In actuality, there are 5,630 male athletes and 5,416 female athletes at in Paris, meaning only 49% of the athletes are women. That tally includes the 200 women competing in rhythmic gymnastics and artistic swimming, events that don’t have any male competitors. (Although artistic swimming rules allowed for men to compete this year, none actually were named to an Olympic team.)
There are 152 women’s events, 157 men’s events, and 20 mixed gender events at the 2024 Olympics. When you look closely at the numbers, a few inequities stand out. In wrestling, there are six women’s events compared to 12 men’s, giving men about 100 more spots. In water polo, there are 10 women’s teams and 12 men’s teams, giving men 26 more athletes.
In soccer, there are 16 men’s team and only 12 women’s teams, giving the men 72 more athletes. And while there has been a push for the IOC to expand the women’s tournament to 16 teams, the IOC told Sky News this week that it was not financially feasible to do so.
“The men’s football tournament is an exception, being the only team sport with 16 teams, based on a long-standing agreement respected by the current IOC leadership,” the IOC said in a statement to Sky News. “Raising the number of women’s teams would potentially trigger requests from other team sports, which would then have an even greater impact on the cost, complexity, size, and sustainability of the Games.”
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But while fact-checking the IOC is always important, I’m far less worried about the quotas themselves, and much more worried about the women the IOC prevents from filling them. In this newsletter, we’re going to look at how the IOC’s support for hijab bans in sport and discrimination against athletes with disorder of sexual development (DSD), among others, make a mockery of the IOC’s mission of inclusion.
Women who wear hijabs
In 2004, France — which has the largest Muslim population in Europe — passed a law citing “secularism” as a reason to ban “signs or dress expressing religious affiliation in public schools.”
While technically the rule could apply to a cross or yarmulke, it was primarily enacted to ban women and girls from wearing a hijab in primary and secondary schools. In the two decades since, multiple governing bodies of sport in France, including the French football, basketball, and volleyball federations, have imposed their own bans on hijabs, on both professional and amateur levels.
Last fall, France confirmed that the hijab ban would be applicable to French athletes during the Paris Olympics.
“French teams are subject to the principle of public service neutrality, from the moment they are selected to this end in all national and international competitions,” the French Sports Ministry said. “Thus, one cannot wear a headscarf (or any other accessory or outfit demonstrating a religious affiliation) when representing France in a national or international sporting competition.”
That’s right: French women are not allowed to compete at the Paris Olympics in a hijab.
As my friend Shireen Ahmed wrote for CBC Sports, “It seems almost surreal that the Olympics are being hosted by a country that actively and ruthlessly excludes women from sport.”
In May, Amnesty International released a letter to the IOC urging President Thomas Bach to use its considerable influence to get France to overturn this ban, pointing out that the ban flies in the face of the “human rights requirements for host countries and the IOC Strategic Framework on Human Rights” and are “antithetical to the Fundamental Principles of Olympism.”
But, while the IOC assured the public that athletes from other countries would be allowed to compete in hijabs in Paris, it did not push back in the slightest against France’s ban. In fact, last week it awarded the French Alps hosting duties for the 2030 Winter Olympics.
In her article, Ahmed called out the hypocrisy and cowardice of France and the IOC:
Why is a hijab-clad woman sprinting down the sideline and scoring a goal for France considered a threat to identity? I fail to see how including women in sport, and showing solidarity with them as they choose to act on their personal rights of religious expression, is bad. Why not grow sport in different communities in France and let Black and brown women who are deeply connected to sport play and enjoy life? Apparently there's no joie de vivre allowed for you in sports if you are a Muslim woman who chooses to cover.
It’s unclear how many athletes France’s hijab ban directly impacts. Frenchwoman Diaba Konaté, a University of California, Irvine basketball player who competed in the NCAA tournament this year, wasn’t a lock to make the French Olympic team. But despite playing on the under-18 national team in her home country, she told USA Today Sports that her relationship with the national team effectively ended when the French basketball association officially implemented its hijab ban in 2022.
“I don't know if I'm good enough, to be honest. I will never be able to answer that. I've never had the opportunity actually to be part of the team,” she said.
French sprinter Sounkamba Sylla, who will compete on the women’s and mixed 400m relay teams, made news last week when she said she couldn’t participate in the opening ceremony with her compatriots because of her hijab. However, she reached a compromise with the French Olympic Committee by covering her hair with an accessory that is not associated with religion, such as the hat she wore in previous prominent international competitions while representing France.
But even if France’s hijab ban didn’t impact a single athlete that qualified for the Paris Olympics, its very existence is a human rights violation that the IOC is tacitly endorsing.
“The effect of these bans is that Muslim women and girls wearing the hijab will never be able to qualify for the Games, given that these bans preclude them from the necessary training and competition opportunities to even reach the Olympic level,” Amnesty International said.
“Additionally, they heighten the context of systemic discrimination, Islamophobia and discrimination on the basis of religion that Muslim women and girl athletes are already subjected to before, during and after the Olympics and Paralympics.”
Women with DSD
As the IOC refuses to stand up for Muslim women, it is also discriminating against another category: Women that it does not believe are woman enough.
In 2021, the IOC changed its policy to allow every sport’s governing body define its rules for transgender participation and for the participation of athletes with a disorder of sexual development (DSD), which is sometimes referred to as intersex.
When the IOC made the change, it stressed its “commitment to respecting human rights” and desire to “foster gender equality and inclusion.” The announcement came with a 10-page guidance for governing bodies that was “aimed at ensuring that competition in each of these categories is fair and safe, and that athletes are not excluded solely on the basis of their transgender identity or sex variations.”
But, despite the IOC’s polite suggestion, governing bodies have gone a different direction. Multiple international sports organizations, including World Athletics (formerly known as the International Amateur Athletics Federation, or IAAF) and World Swimming, have issued blanket bans on transgender women competing in the women’s category, offering them no pathway to participation at all.
And World Athletics also expanded its already strict and scientifically questionable regulations for DSD athletes, ruling that they are ineligible to compete in the women’s category in track unless they artificially lower their naturally-occurring levels of testosterone to under 2.5 nanomoles per liter for two years. The only way to do that is through an invasive surgery or medication that can have devastating side effects.
I highly recommend listening to a podcast by NPR and CBC, “Tested,” hosted by journalist Rose Eveleth, which follows the story of Christine Mboma, a Namibian sprinter with DSD, and looks back at the 100-year history of sex testing in elite sports. That series goes into much more detail and nuance than I will be able to entertain in this newsletter.
But to give a quick download, most people with DSD are assigned female at birth and raised as women, but are born with a rare condition that leaves them with higher levels of testosterone than the average cisgender woman and XY chromosomes. Since 2009, when 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya burst onto the scene with a gold medal at the world championships and news leaked that she was subjected to sex testing and had intersex traits, World Athletics has been on a crusade to get DSD athletes out of the sport.
In 2011, in response to Semenya’s case, World Athletics adopted a new policy requiring women with high levels of testosterone to reduce it to under 10 nanomoles per liter. In 2015, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) temporarily suspended these regulations after a challenge by Indian sprinter Dutee Chand. At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Semenya won gold in the 800m. (Chand didn’t make it to the final of her sprint event.)
In 2019, the IAAF implemented new restrictions, this time restricting DSD athletes just from the middle-distance events — so, Semenya’s event and a couple of others — unless they lowered their testosterone to under five nmol/L. Then, at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, two DSD athletes who switched events to comply with these rules had success — Mboma won a silver medal in the 200m, and Francine Niyonsaba, a Burundian runner who won silver in the 800m in Rio, finished fifth in the 10,000m.
So, in March 2023, the new restrictions were released. When issuing them, World Athletics admitted they were discriminatory, but said “the Council decided to prioritize fairness and the integrity of the female competition before inclusion.” World Athletics president Sebastian Coe even said that without these changes, “no woman’s ever going to win another sporting event,” a statement that has absolutely no basis in fact.
Part of what makes this so frustrating is that the IOC can be inclusive, when it choses to be. At these very Olympics, while stars like Niyonsaba and Mboma sit at home, boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are able to compete in the women’s category, despite the fact that the International Boxing Association (IBA) blocked them at last year’s world championships for reportedly having DSD. But the IOC actually oversees boxing at the Olympics, not the IBA. And the IOC has gone to bat for Khelif and Yu-ting.
“These boxers are entirely eligible, they are women on their passports, they have competed for many years,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams stated at a press conference this week.
“I actually think it is not helpful to start stigmatizing people who take part in sport like this. They are women who competed in Tokyo. I think we all have a responsibility to dial down this and not turn it into some kind of witch-hunt. These are regular athletes who have competed for many years in boxing, they are entirely eligible and they are women on their passports.”
It is, of course, great that Khelif and Yu-ting are able to compete in the bodies they were born in, even as right-wing media uses their presence to stoke the flames of the culture war. But if that’s the IOC’s policy and perspective, why is it happy to sit idly by while World Athletics does actually go on a witch hunt to weed out DSD athletes for 15 years? It’s a bit late now to claim try to tamper down the stigma. It’s simply not good enough to suggest and promote fairness and equality if you’re not going to provide consequences to the countries and sports that don’t practice it.
So, while we watch the rest of the Olympic games and cheer on the women and men and nonbinary athletes from across the globe who are allowed to showcase their natural talents and abilities on the greatest stage in sports, let’s remember those who aren’t represented. The “Olympic spirit” is a beautiful thing to cheer for, but when Black and Brown women from already-marginalized populations are being purposefully discriminated against and excluded by the people in charge, it’s not nearly as bountiful as it should be.