Want More Olympic Medals? Increase Gender Equality.
Watching the 2014 Winter Olympics, I noticed that women tend to win more medals in countries with more gender equality. In such countries, girls are probably encouraged more to play competitive sports. I decided to examine this empirically by first plotting the total number of medals won by a country by its World Economic Forum Gender Gap Ranking . This ranking is based on parity between men and women’s levels of economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. Here is the result of that plot: As you can see, as a country’s gender equality goes down, so does its number of Olympic medals. For example, Slovakia ranks 74th in the world for gender equality and has won only one medal, whereas Norway ranks 3rd and has won 26. The correlation between a country’s gender gap ranking and its medals won is -.29. The main outlier above is host country Russia, with a gender gap ranking of 61 and 33 medals; without Russia this correlati