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 correlation is -.40.

Perhaps most — or all — of this advantage is accounted for by medals won by women. Countries with more gender equality may simply win more of the women’s, but not the men’s, medals in the games. Here is a plot of women’s medals by country gender gap ranking:


So there is an even stronger relationship — a negative correlation of -.41 — between gender inequality and women’s medals. For example, Japan ranks 105th among countries in gender equality and has won two women’s medals, whereas the Netherlands (a country 1/8 the size) ranks 13th and has won 10.

What about men? Maybe there’s no relationship between gender inequality and medals won by men, or there’s even a positive relationship, so that countries in which men dominate women more also have more dominant male athletes. It turns out that’s not so — in fact, a negative relationship (-.20) between a country’s gender inequality and medals won holds for men as well:


For example, Canada ranks 20th in gender equality and has won 12 men’s medals, whereas Korea (a country half again as large) ranks 111th and has won only one.

In short, rather than expanding the pie of medals for women at the expense of men, a country’s gender equality appears to expand the pie of medals for all athletes in that country.

There are more fundamental reasons than Olympic medals to strive for economic, educational, health, and political equality between the sexes, but we can think of Olympic medals as the cherry on top. Strength in winter sports is correlated with things other than gender equality, like northern latitudes and national wealth. But these data suggest that countries wishing to excel in international sporting competitions should also strive for equality between women and men.

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