IOC and creative gender counting

Christian Widholm
Södertörn University

The book under review here, Gender Equality and the Olympic Programme by Michele K. Donnelly, examines how the IOC and International Sport Federations (IFs) have worked with gender issues around the Olympic Games between 2012 and 2022. The book is published in the Routledge series “Women, Sport and Physical Activity” that offers “new perspectives on the involvement of women in sport and physical activity.” Donnelly is an established scholar specialized in social inequality, alternative sports and subcultures, and qualitative research methods.

The main material used in this study is composed of the IOC’s Olympic Programme and its Agenda 2020 together with IF publications. According to Donnelly, “decisions made about the Olympic Programme – what and who is included and excluded /…/ are incredibly revealing of the gendered logic of the Olympic movement”. Since 2014 the IOC, and eventually the IFs, seem to have stepped up the work to achieve gender equality. At face value their rhetoric looks promising, and the IOC even implies that the work was accomplished during the Summer Games in Tokyo (2021) and Paris (2024). Donnelly is however not that easily convinced. Thus, she sets out to assess whether the seemingly gender progressive language and practices around the Olympic Games have made any difference. In addition, and this is actually the primary purpose of the book (p. 23), the author tries to decide what the IOC and the IFs mean by gender equality. The latter aspiration, which has influenced the outline of the book, results in an investigation (in chapter 2) of the assumption that gender equality is the same as gender balance, i.e., a quantitative understanding of gender, and (in chapter 3) that the Olympic Games still include gender discrimination that the balanced numbers do not reveal. The subsequent two chapters dig deeper into the themes presented in chapter 2 and 3 by looking at how mixed-gender events quantitatively and qualitatively tend to reproduce status quo, i.e., masculine supremacy. The final chapter contains a summarizing discussion.

Thus, Donnelly suggests that the IOC is practising “creative counting” in order to claim that the equality goal is reached.

Already in chapter two it is established that gender equality for the IOC means gender parity. So, when the IOC claims that a 50/50 situation is achieved, everything seems to be fine. However, even if the IOC claims to have achieved balanced numbers, Donnelly shows that for some team disciplines, for instance Ice Hockey, it is stipulated that a men’s team consists of 25 players while a women’s consists of 23. And further, that men’s relay teams, in Cycling for example, can have more competitors than the women’s relay teams. Thus, Donnelly suggests that the IOC is practising “creative counting” in order to claim that the equality goal is reached. Another problem is that at the same time as the IOC strives to include more women athletes and events, it is trying to reduce the total number of athletes to address concerns about “gigantism”. This leads to a zero sum game where men’s participation can be affected negatively due to the IOC’s gender equality ambitions, which makes gender equality seem to disadvantage men.

Chapter three explores institutionalized gender differences. According to the author, these are developed by the IFs and played out at the Games. Here are the (arbitrary) differences between women’s and men’s length of races discussed, as well as the differences between weight classes in Boxing, Rowing and Luge; differences in measurement pertaining to equipment (e.g., Javelin); differences in rules (e.g., bodychecking is illegal in women’s Ice Hockey); uniforms (required tight and small uniforms for women in some disciplines); and how the vocabulary of some IFs until recently (2021) used the term ‘ladies’ (implying “a tone of frivolity and lightness to the strivings and accomplishment of women”) instead of ‘women’.

Chapter four and five investigates how mixed-gender events quantitatively and qualitatively affect gender issues at the Games. The IOC seems to think that mixed-gender events are advantageous for the development of gender equality. These events have even been counted as “women’s events” for the sake of favourable gender statistics. However, as mentioned earlier, these events tend to reproduce status quo and thus masculine supremacy. For example, in some mixed events the competition is arranged so that only men competes against men (long race) while women compete against women (short race). These arrangements tend to accentuate men’s domination. In addition, in relays it is common that men finish the race which, in case of medal position, attracts more media attention to the men.

The final short chapter contains a summarizing critical discussion. However, here the author concedes that progress has been made, while at the same time it is stated that “is has taken 120 years to arrive at this point.”

The book does not contain explicit theory and method chapters. But it is implied that the analysis is based on a general critical reading of texts and practices pertaining to the Olympic Games and that the theoretical approach is social constructionism: “The Olympic programme is not natural, neutral, or ‘just what it is’; it is the result of decisions made by humans” (p. 12). It should, however, be acknowledged that theoretical references are provided throughout the book, and the absence of theory and method chapters is further remedied by the convincing undertaking with all the empirical examples. Sometimes it becomes a bit boring to read all the technical details regarding specific disciplines (such as the weight classes for women versus men, or the length and width of javelins, etc.) but overall, these details both show that the research has been done with precision and that gender issues can be hidden in the most miniscule or banal matters.

In general, I appreciate this book. However, a few things that came to my mind when reading it were a possible neglect of a broader discussion about the influence of the financial and organizational structures of both the IOC and the IFs, and also the role of mass- and social media. In the equation of balancing gender numbers and being able to offer additional events without including more athletes, the IFs are struggling, not for, as it seems (p. 39), gender equality, but for more medals and media coverage. For me it seems that the bottom line for the IFs is first and foremost financial, even if the gender aspect is included in the equation. The financial dimension when it comes to IOC is perhaps even more crucial. Since the inception of The Olympic Partner (TOP) programme in 1985, when the IOC managed to tie a few top sponsors to its enterprise, the organization can probably adjust to social equality issues to a reasonable extent, but its bottom line will probably remain financial.

A final critical comment: I do not find the comparison between the IOC and the United States convincing (p. 47). The American legislation Title IX that prohibits gender-based discrimination is a bill approved by a reasonably democratic state (a few weeks before the installation of Trump). The IOC, however, is a not a state and it cannot be said to be democratic and transparent.

Despite these critical comments I found Donnelly’s book interesting and convincing in general, and it will certainly be useful for students, scholars, and policy makers.

Copyright © Christian Widholm 2025