DPA
Paris
Olympic organizers have defended their assertion that Paris 2024 is the first Games with full gender parity, despite quoting figures themselves which prove it is not equal.
Marie Sallois, the International Olympic Committee’s director of corporate & sustainable development, told a daily news conference on Sunday: “Paris 2024 will be the first Olympic Games with full gender parity on the field of play. “Gender equality has been mainstreamed throughout everything and at the heart of the Olympic Games.”
It is true that more than half of medal events are now open to women, although the breakdown is 157 men’s events, 152 women’s events and 20 mixed-gender events.
Only 28 out of the 32 sports are gender-balanced, with the figures also skewed by only women competing in rhythmic gymnastics.
Sallois added: “We have been working a lot with international federations for them to include more women in their technical officials, referees and judges. And we are proud to report that five of them: tennis, triathlon, canoeing, sailing and field hockey, will reach parity here in Paris.”
There are 32 sports in Paris. Coaching is another area where the numbers do not match.
“We also need to work on how we get more women in coaching positions when we know that they represent only 7% of the coaches in Tokyo (2021),” Sallois said.
“There are many hurdles still for women to access these roles. Often, still in society, women take care of the kids and there is no support system for them to take care of their kids and coach.”
Women’s marathon highlights schedule changes Yiannis Exarchos, chief executive of the Olympic Broadcasting Services, said scheduling was much more gender equal than previously.
“The schedules of sporting events have traditionally been biased towards highlighting men’s events. We have worked during these years to make the programme of competition of the Games of Paris as equal as possible,” he said.
“Traditionally, the last event is the men’s marathon. Here, for the first time, the last (athletics) event of the Games is going to be the women’s marathon. Here you will see very, very important sports like basketball, where it will be the reverse (with women last).”
But he conceded camera operators still linger on shots of some women. “You can tell that even today there exists camera operators, in some events and directors in some events, will go with a very, very tight shot in the face of a woman but they wouldn’t do the same for a man,” he said.
“You can tell that there was an unconscious bias about who do they show when they are women and who do they show when they are men, that they reflect this very traditionalist stereotype.
“It’s not like people do it, or professionals do it, because they want to. They are used to doing that. It’s a habit. We need to get rid of it.”
