With gender parity being exactly 50/50 in these Olympics, the women of the U.S. won 65% of their gold medals, and also won a greater percentage of medals overall than the men did. Now it’s not like the American men did bad or anything, but clearly they are a step behind the women, and there’s a few reasons for this.
The first is Title IX: for those unaware, title IX ensures that men and women in the US have equal opportunity in all regards, including sports and athletics. Especially in collegiate sports, there are regulations that colleges must follow to make sure women are given the same opportunity as men, things such as giving out an equal number of scholarships, making sure practice times are equitable, etc… To my knowledge (correct me if I’m wrong), there are not many other countries where this is a thing. So the U.S. women receive much better training and have more opportunities for success compared to other countries, as more money is probably spent on men’s sports in these other countries and they don’t invest in women’s sports as heavily.
But that’s only part of the equation: because why exactly, if the men in the U.S. get the same training and opportunities as the women in the U.S., shouldn’t they be performing just as well? The simple answer as to why they aren’t is football (American football). Football is the number one most invested sport in the U.S., and is played almost exclusively by men. Colleges pour all their money and scholarships into football, which means in order to comply with Title IX, they have to make cuts to some other men’s programs, such as gymnastics, wrestling, volleyball, etc…
Why do you think U.S. women’s gymnastics has always been superior to men’s gymnastics? Well, because if you’re a male athlete in the U.S. and you want a scholarship, chances are you’re more likely to find one playing football, as opposed to gymnastics. Not to say you can’t find one for gymnastics, but it’s much harder. This isn’t the case for women however, as football is not a sport where they get scholarships.
For women’s sports, the funding is more well-rounded. Basketball may get a bit more, but other than that, I’d like to take a guess that the rest of the sports get roughly equal funding, not to mention there aren’t any sports with a significantly higher number of players. However, for men’s sports, football gets a large portion the money, and basketball also get a decent amount. This leaves other men’s sports that are typically in the Olympics in the dust. Not to mention, a football team has about 50-60 players, which eats up much more scholarships for men, and unfortunately, other sports are sacrificed for it.
This is just the culture of the US and it’s not going to change anytime soon. Football generates the most revenue, and so colleges aren’t going to have any incentive to cut funding for football programs. But they will have to keep making more and more cuts to other men’s sports, unless something systematically changes.
As far as I’m aware, in future Olympics, the US women will either keep doing better or remain about the same amount ahead of their competition, whereas the US men will continue to trend downwards and not be as dominant, because colleges and other athletic programs will invest way more into football (a non-Olympic sport) than they will into sports that are part of the Olympics.
One of the reasons why female athletes perform better in the medal table is that women’s sports are not competitive enough worldwide, and many economically underdeveloped countries cannot even afford to develop women’s sports. But men’s sports are much more competitive.
But the US’s policy has created investment in women’s athletics so it bucks the trend and helps them win… Which is what the OP is saying. The US also used to give less resources to women
The part of the post explaining why American women are overperforming is correct, the problem is the part of the post about men underperforming because of American football. There is no proof that American men are underperforming, just that American women get more gold in a field that is slightly less competitive because not as many countries invest in their women yet.
The post is just pointing out that women’s Olympic sports get more funding than men’s due to title IX. The relative dominance of US women is a combination of lower competition and higher funding and top male athletes choosing lucrative non-Olympic sports.
Football/soccer is the main example
Usa women dominated because the rest of the world literally didn’t care.
Now the interest is growing in Europe but there is still a long way to go, all women matches (except the ones involving France) were like with 80% empty stadium, there were a lot more people watching the men U23 tournament…
As a Canadian you can see it with us as well. Look at how well our Canadian women have done relative to our men. It’s not like we’re short on men’s players either, soccer is super popular here. You can look to the winter Olympics as well and how the men’s tournament goes for hockey relative to the women. There are several countries who really have a chance to win for the men but for the women it’s Canada and the US. That’s it. Since the introduction of women’s ice hockey in 98 Canada and the US have won gold and silver every time except once when Sweden won silver in 06. Everyone else is playing for bronze on the women’s side.
It’s just a really tremendous commentary on how well women are treated in the United States from a sports perspective.
Feels like a lot of people lose sight of that.
American women interested in sport are extremely fortunate ladies.
Depends on the event. There are a ton of well performing female athletes in track from poor African and relatively poor carribean nations. Of course, swimming is something a poor nation is not going to have success in for obvious reasons.
That is not “sport”, that is “genetics”.
“Ethiopian highlands” people are specially build for long distance running. So is small parts of western africa, all the US, Jamaican sprinters have traces to a small region in west africa.
Then the people around caucasian mountains for strend sports such as weightlifting, boxing and wrestling. Since those are mostly poor countries, only men comes from those region to olympic level.
It’s both. These people aren’t just plucked from villages and sent to the Olympics. They train and travel all over the world to compete in qualifying events in the three years before every Olympics. A random 16-30 year old Ethiopian would still get destroyed in a 15k in a sub-national championship race with only white athletes. But yes, at the very top of the elite level genetics matter
Well you don’t exactly need a huge program to be built up to run in a circle or long distance. That’s why those poorer African/Caribbean nations can perform so well in track events.
I think this again, goes to my point. Men in the US are offered less scholarships and training in other sports like gymnastics, volleyball, wrestling, etc… that they don’t get the extra push to be the best in the world at what they do, hence why the playing field is more level in men’s sports.
Remember there has to be a 50/50 split between male and female scholarships and football takes up 85 scholarships alone so every male sport they had they need to add like two women’s sports. That’s the main drive in my opinion.
I think it’s also kind of gross how people cheer watching men and boys damage their brains playing US football. What kind of message does it send to them? I have tried to watch it so many times, but it’s so unnecessarily violent.
I don’t agree with this tbh. Yes the scholarship system help the women but elite men will never have an issue finding scholarships or chances to compete so the US male athletes are as good as they’ll be even if you got rid of college football.
What makes the women stronger comparatively than the men is that the so many other countries can’t fund elite athletes in women’s events but will find and fund the elite athletes in male events. Poorer countries only have so many resources so they predictably dedicate them to male sports first and also male athletes are normally able to better self fund themselves so they can create athletes that can compete with the US in male events but not in the female events.
The only reason that the US is dominant in the Olympics is because of their financial muscle. This is funded by the economy and the college system and is a great achievement for the US. If every other country suddenly was able to fund their female athletes at the same levels that they fund their male athletes then the US would be less dominant in female events and it would drop down to around the same levels as the men’s dominance. It’s not football taking scholarships away from the men it’s that women in other countries can’t afford to be as good as their male athletes and that’s before we talk about countries where women are prohibited or encouraged not to take part in sport so they have less athletes.
It’s not about scholarships
You’re missing out on the fact that a lot of men play team sports because it’s an easier road to success without needing to be the fastest, the strongest, etc.
Like if you’re the 100th strongest person in the world, you could be an animal on the football field with the right skills development, coaching, team, etc. But being the 100th strongest person in the world does you no good in the Olympics, you have to make that top 3 or no one even cares who you are. No one gives a shit about the 20th best freestyle wrestler, the 80th fastest man alive, or the 200th ranked 800m Steeplechase runner, even though all of those people are objectively incredible athletes and their gifts would have given them a lot of potential in team sports had they been raised playing them.
Agreed. The drop off in womens sports is immense. The top ten to twenty players might be as skilled in reletive terms as their male collegues. But after that the level drops. The 100 ranked player in mens is often still a professional. In womens it regularly is some housewife or college kid.
Yes, looking at the top 10 of medal table, I found that in more developed countries, women perform better than men. This also proves my point. Only developed countries have more money invested in women’s sports, because the level of professionalism of women’s sports is low and there are not enough sports leagues to support them. Worldwide, the number of female professional athletes is far less than that of men, but there are as many female athletes as men in the Olympics.
Agreed. It’s pretty obvious that a 3rd world country like Australia has put practically no investment in women’s break dancing for example.
Note the several recent examples of “average person makes Olympics via a loophole” in the last 30 or so years have all been women. Men not so much.
In developing countries, top earning female athletes tend to be in sports which either have mass following (cricket in the subcontinent, tack and field in East Africa) or are generational medal prospects in their sports who get a lot of support for that reason.
I hate to say it, but… this was very obvious in basketball when watching the men’s vs women’s gold medal games.
I agree. A lot of countries aren’t even sending girls to school, so they’re definitely not investing much in girls/women’s sports.
“Only 49 per cent of countries have achieved gender parity in primary education. At the secondary level, the gap widens: 42 per cent of countries have achieved gender parity in lower secondary education, and 24 per cent in upper secondary education.”
Yeah, a lot of the major nations win more women than men’s medals. Russia (2016), China, Korea, Australia, germany and the Netherlands all had more female than male medal winners the last Olympics.
The Russia example is probably influenced by state sponsored doping. Women get bigger performance gains than men from steroids (source) so a country that is doping all of their athletes will see a bigger performance increase in their female competitors.
That’s entirely possible, but they didn’t win a lot of women’s medals in disciplines like sprinting, weightlifting, cycling, throwing etc. where being doped to the gills is basically mandatory to have a chance.
I would expect them to dominate a lot more in those disciplines if the reason of good women’s performance was that they doped more succesfully than the competition (similar how we saw east Germany dominate).
Afaik they have a fairly developed system for scouting and developing women’s talent - and quite a lot of sport funding on general.
Yep, was going to post the same and found your point.
Its a combination of poverty and conservatism, but mostly poverty.
Many ignore how important is childhood nutrition for one to become a elite world-class athlete. There are like of Pele that is pure genius, but for majority its not. World class athletes are build from the childhood.
So probability of one come up is very rare and take long time. In such environment, boys tend to get more opportunity to continue while the threshold for girls are much higher.