While the gap is closing, there are still areas where women have little or no access by comparison with men.
Nordic combined, a sport fusing cross-country skiing and ski jumping that has been on the Olympic docket since 1924, is the only winter sport in which women do not participate. (Women are expected to be able to compete soon, perhaps by 2026.)
Even if a sport is available to both men and women, there are often far fewer competition spots allocated to women than to men. This week, the bobsledder and skeleton athlete Simidele Adeagbo, who in 2018 became the first Black woman to compete in skeleton at the Olympics, sent a letter to the governing body for her sports claiming that gender discrimination had blocked her from competing in this year’s Games. In the letter, which was reported earlier by Reuters, lawyers for Adeagbo said she had been excluded from the monobob event in Beijing because of “an insidious and willful gender disparity in the number of sled spots made available for men and women.”
Men hold the advantage in terms of slots: There are 28 sled spots reserved for men in the four-man bobsled event and 30 spots reserved for the two-man competition. Women are allotted 20 spots in the monobob and 20 in the two-woman bobsled.
There are disparities in other sports at the Winter Olympics. Cross-country skiing, Alpine skiing, biathlon and long-track speedskating all have men’s events that cover greater distances than the women’s events do. If men are competing in events that are seen as “bigger” than women’s, that overshadows women’s events, which may be “seen as secondary or less than,” LaVoi said.
Ski jumping, which added a women’s division in 2014, also comes up short. Though a mixed team event was added to the Olympic agenda in Beijing, giving women another opportunity to win medals, men still have more chances to make the podium. Anna Hoffman of the United States, who made her Olympic debut in Beijing, posted a video on TikTok highlighting the fact that the ski jumping event featuring the large hill, which stands at about 450 feet, excludes women at the Olympics, even though women can now compete on the large hills at other international events, including the World Championships.
Hoffman said that the competition on the large hill in the women’s game was exceptional, yet despite the achievements of recent years, “we are still being told to be patient and wait” when it comes to Olympic programming.
