Much more to look at here regarding gender equality at the Olympics – I hope to be able to get to medals by gender – or at least which gender did better with their opportunity by country, but also at potential medals by gender. That’ll be a hard number to get to, but I’m going to see if I can!
In the mean time, here’s a quick look at a map of gender balance by country. Gender Balance here is a calculation of the variance of female athletes to male athletes. A score of 1 (red) designates that there are 100% more female athletes than male athletes. -1 (dark blue) means there are 100% more men than women. 0 (orange) is perfect parity. Note that many of the countries at the extremes have very few athletes (which would lend itself to higher variances), but not all.
Overall the gender balance doesn’t look too bad, though individual countries are sometimes more or less balanced than others. Straight athlete counts are only so useful, as team events and skew the numbers fairly significantly (check out Korea below – it’s all women because of the one Women’s Ice Hockey event – where the combined North and South Korean women’s team is competing as Korea). Also, the Nordic Combined sport only offers mens events, and would you believe that Ski Jumping was only admitted as a women’s event in the 2014 Sochi games?
OLYMPICS DATA 