For the first time in Olympic history, the gender split is envisaged to be split evenly. The upcoming Paris Olympics is presumably the most gender balanced with 10,500 athletes expected to attend, out of them 5,250 are men and 5250 are women.
It’s a great achievement!
To attain this stellar feat, it is even more than just the parity of male and female athletes in every given sport. The Games of the XIV Olympiad to be held in Paris will include 32 disciplines comprising 329 competitions. But there is still some type of sports that are still having gender segregations, for instance, Rhythmic Gymnastics category has 94 females while Greco-Roman wrestling currently has no females. Due to these inequalities, measures had been taken by the quotas in the team in collectively recommended sporting events such as water polo and football among others. In Men’s water polo, the event will have twelve teams and women’s water polo will be conducted with ten Teams. In football they plan to host 16 men’s teams and 12 women’s teams.
More attention deserves to be given to the fact that for the first time in Olympics men will be able to participate in artistic swimming as part of the team event, although no-one has been named among 10 teams that qualified for Olympics. The only sporting discipline where the integrated format of male and female competition takes place is equestrian events. Women have performed as skillfully as men and there is proof of this in the recent Tokyo Olympic where females won nine of the fifteen gold medals in equestrian.
Some argue that the unique nature of equestrian sports, where the horse’s role can diminish the significance of the rider’s gender, facilitates such mixed-gender competition. Outside of mixed team events, separating male and female competitors respects physiological differences and should be considered a different form of promoting gender equality.
Let’s keep it going!
It remains to be seen if this precise gender balance will be maintained by the time the Paris Olympics officially commence, as various factors could influence the final count. Nevertheless, France’s committed effort to uphold gender equality is unmistakable, fitting for a nation that has produced luminaries such as Marie Curie, Joan of Arc, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir.
