A glance at the gender breakdown of athletes at the Paris 2024 Olympics

GENEVA — Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games and former IOC president, once said that having women compete in the Olympics was “unrealistic, uninteresting, unaesthetic and inappropriate.”

More than a century later, the 2024 Paris Olympics will aim for gender equality in the same city where women took part in the first Olympic Games in 1900.

The IOC had set a target of more than 11,000 male and female competitors, split 50-50, including reserve athletes, to take part in the games from July 26 to August 11. But the IOC’s latest figures suggest organizers may fall just short of that target.

Men won slightly more medals than women

Men still have a slight advantage in the 329 medal events at the Paris Olympics: There are 157 men’s events, 152 women’s events and 20 mixed events, according to the IOC.

The IOC said 28 of the 32 sports will be “fully gender equal,” including new disciplines such as dance to music. Rhythmic gymnastics will remain women-only, but men will be able to compete in artistic swimming.

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Mixed team events are also being strongly promoted. Three years ago at the Tokyo Olympics, the 4x400m mixed relay in athletics and the 4x100m mixed medley relay in swimming made their debuts and left a strong impression.

“There is nothing more equal than men and women competing on the same field, on the same teams, for the same sporting performance,” said IOC sports director Kit McConnell.

How many athletes competed in Paris?

One week before the opening ceremony, the official IOC database for the Paris Olympics listed 11,215 athletes, including reserves, registered for competition, with 5,712 for men’s competition and 5,503 for women’s competition, a ratio of 51% and 49% for women’s competition.

In track and field, which has qualification standards that athletes must reach, there were 50 more boys registered, 1,091 compared with 1,041 girls. In swimming, the difference was 464 to 393.

Read: Team USA will again send more women than men to the 2024 Paris Olympics

In soccer, 16 teams participated in the men’s tournament and 12 in the women’s tournament, with 351 men and 264 women participating. In wrestling, 193 men and 96 women entered, with Greco-Roman being a men’s only category.

In equestrian, where men and women compete in the same events, the number of entries was 154 and 96.

There were no male athletes registered for artistic swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, both of which have a total of 200 female athletes. Rhythmic gymnastics does not have a men’s division.

Which team has the most players in the women’s competition?

FILE – U.S. flag bearer Eddie Alvarez and U.S. flag bearer Sue Bird and their delegation parade during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. (Photo by Martin Buelow/AFP)

The United States, the largest team in Paris, will field 338 athletes in the women’s competition, the most of any country, or 53 percent of the 638 total athletes, according to the IOC’s tournament database released this week.

The 38 men’s deficit is due in part to the fact that the U.S. qualified 19 athletes in women’s field hockey but did not compete in the men’s event and registered nine women for artistic swimming.

Read: Team USA has two goals at the 2024 Paris Olympics: Gold medal and a match with Simone Biles

France, which received an invitation to compete in all team events, had 293 women registered, followed by Australia with 276, China with 259 and Germany with 239.

Other teams have much smaller numbers of players but a larger number of women.

Guam, a U.S. island territory east of the Philippines, topped the list with seven of its eight athletes being women, or 87.5 percent, according to the IOC database. Guam’s seven women are competing in six different sports. Nicaragua has six of its seven athletes scheduled to compete, or 86 percent, and Sierra Leone is at 80 percent.

The strength of Kosovo’s women’s judo team is due to the fact that four out of nine total athletes are female, increasing the proportion of female athletes to 77%. The teams of North Korea, Laos and Vietnam all have 75% female athletes.

Which team has the fewest women?

Of the 205 official Olympic teams, six – Belize, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Liechtenstein, Nauru and Somalia – had no elite-level female athletes on their roster.

Just one woman, or 7 percent, is on Qatar’s 14-member team as it seeks to host the Olympics in 2036. Half of Qatar’s contingent is in the men’s track and field events, including defending high jump champion Mutaz Essa Barshim.

Mali and South Sudan will each receive 7%. Mali will send 22 men’s football players, and South Sudan will send 12 men’s basketball players.

In El Salvador, one in eight athletes is a woman (12.5%).

Two non-binary athletes compete

The registered entries for the women’s event in Paris include two athletes who identify as non-binary and transgender.

Nikki Hiltz will make her Olympic debut at the Stade de France after winning the 1,500 meters at last month’s U.S. Track and Field Trials.

Quinn won gold with Canada’s soccer team at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago and will return to help defend the title.

When did women first compete in the Olympics?

Nikki Hiltz reacts after winning the women’s 1500m final during day 10 of the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Track and Field Trials at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon on June 30, 2024. Patrick Smith/Getty Images/AFP

Paris welcomed women athletes for the first time in the 1900 Olympics (the second modern Olympic Games), when 22 of the 997 athletes who competed were women, or 2.2% of the total number of athletes. The modern Olympic Games began in Athens in 1896.

In Paris, women competed in team events in tennis and golf, as well as sailing, croquet and equestrian.

Great Britain’s Charlotte Cooper became the first woman to win an individual gold medal in tennis singles.

Decades of Gender Equality

When the Olympics were held again in Paris exactly 100 years ago, only 4.4% of athletes were women. In the 1924 “Chariots of Fire” Olympics, 135 of the 3,089 athletes were women, according to an IOC study.

This figure rose to 9.5% for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, dropped to 8.4% four years later in Berlin, and then recovered to 9.5% again when London hosted the Summer Olympics in 1948.

At the 1976 Montreal Games, the percentage of women rose to 20.7 percent, and approached 23 percent when the Games returned to Los Angeles in 1984. This was also the time when rhythmic gymnastics and artistic swimming, then called synchronized swimming, were introduced for the first time.

The IOC has pressured Olympic teams, which have traditionally fielded only men, to finish the race. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei first fielded women at the 2012 London Olympics. At that year’s Olympics, 44.2% of athletes competed in the women’s competition. That figure rose to 45% at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games and 48% at the Tokyo Games. At the Tokyo Games, the IOC encouraged teams to select one man and one woman to be flag bearers for the opening ceremony.

How did we get here?

The IOC formally committed to “promoting gender quality” as part of a wide-ranging reform package pushed through by recently elected President Thomas Bach in December 2014.

The IOC’s sports department worked with sports governing bodies to eliminate some men’s medal events and add more women’s medal events, and since then, federations have achieved greater equality for women athletes on the field than they have in their own offices.

A survey of 31 Tokyo Olympic sport governing bodies in 2020 found that only one had a 40% female ratio on its board of directors, while 18 had a female ratio below 25%.

Check out Inquirer Sports’ special coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympics.