At the 2024 Summer Olympics, headlines celebrated a historic milestone: for the first time, the number of women competing almost matched that of men. It is an important moment, but it raises a harder question: why did it take over a century to get here?
Prof.dr. Gijsbert Oonk, specialised in the field of global history, sport (migration of athletes) and national identity, produced an open access data set and wrote an inspiring short essay about this. He uses new comprehensive athlete-level data and discusses patterns of inclusion and exclusion across the full history of the modern Olympic Games.
By compiling athlete-level data across the entire modern Olympic period, Oonks work allows us to trace patterns of inclusion and exclusion over time, across countries, and within specific sports. Rather than treating sport as an isolated domain, it approaches the Olympics as a global arena where wider gender, political, and cultural inequalities are played out.
Gender parity is an important achievement. However, it is not the finish line. The next step is to connect gender inclusion to wider inequalities in nationality, migration, and access to resources. Oonk will focus on this in his next essay as part of this series.
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