Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Melinda French Gates discusses her new era, the childcare crisis may be holding back working women, and the first "gender-equal" Olympics only tells part of the story. Have a mindful Monday.
- Equality in Paris. The Paris 2024 Olympics kicked off on Friday with France's opening ceremony, Coco Gauff and LeBron James as the United States' flag-bearers, Celine Dion's return to performing—and a historic milestone. This year's competition has been touted as the first "gender-equal" Games, with a 50/50 split between male and female athletes competing in Paris.
In total, 5,630 male athletes and 5,416 female athletes are set to compete over the course of the Games—just shy of 50/50. It's a statistic of note a century after women staged their own competition after being excluded from the 1924 Olympics in Paris, 12 years after the International Olympic Committee first allowed women to compete in all sports, and a decade after the IOC set this 2024 target. Yet it's far from the whole story.
The Olympics has called 28 out of 32 sports "fully gender-equal." More than half of medal events are open to female athletes, with 152 women's events, 157 men's events, and 20 mixed-gender events. Some of these stats can be credited not to the growth of women's sports but to the shrinking of the male field; that is the case in Olympic boxing.
"Medal count and opportunities for women's participation are all critical factors," says Danette Leighton, CEO of the Women's Sports Foundation. "But we also want to look at it through a more holistic lens."
There are other factors to keep an eye on. Men still outnumber women in coaching roles (in the 2020 Games, only 21% of U.S. head coaches were women). A gender gap still exists at the Paralympic Summer Games; 42% of athletes were women in the last Paralympic Summer Games, and the gulf widens significantly for Winter Games. And then we must consider the experience of female athletes on the ground once they make it to the Olympics. There's been some progress on that front; Olympian Allyson Felix supported a nursery in the Paris Olympic Village, sponsored by Pampers, for athlete parents seeking childcare.
As we watch the Games unfold—and no doubt witness athletes like Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, and many more reach new heights (Biles has already submitted a new skill for approval, which would be the sixth named after her)—we can appreciate this milestone without forgetting how much work there still is to do to support women in sports.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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