Women in the Olympics
Besides the discrimination women and girls
face in high school and college, amateur sports are also
biased against women.
The Amateur Sports Act, passed in 1978,
requires the United States Olympic Committee and its National
Governing Bodies for each sport to operate in a nondiscriminatory
manner. Yet sixteen years after this federal law passed
the governing bodies of the United States Olympic Committee
(USOC) are still overwhelmingly male. Out of the USOC's
100-member Board of Directors, only 19 are women. The
USOC's 19-member Executive Committee has only four women.
According to the USOC's member services
and grants department, women were 37% of Olympic athletes
for 1991-92, and received only 35% of the "subsistence"
grants the USOC gives to athletes for their training and
living expenses.
The Olympics offers fewer sports for women
than men. During the 1992 Summer Olympics, men competed
in 159 events, and women competed in 86. In the 1994 Winter
Olympics, men had 34 events, and women had 25. The Atlanta
Olympics will host a record 3,780 female Olympians, yet
there will still be far more men -- more than 6,500.
The USOC is "dedicated to providing opportunities
for American athletes of all ages. "Yet it seems to be
doing a much better job of providing opportunities for
men than women.
In some fundamentalist Muslim countries,
women are barred from participating in the Olympics. An
international women's group called "Atlanta Plus" has
launched a campaign demanding that nations who do not
allow women on their Olympic delegations be excluded from
the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. At the 1992 Summer Olympics
in Barcelona, 34 countries had no women athletes.
Atlanta Plus, led by European women's groups,
argues that gender discrimination is similar to racial
discrimination, and countries who bar women from the Olympics
should be excluded, just as South Africa was excluded
because of racial discrimination. The initial response
from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) director
was that the exclusion of women from Islamic country Olympic
teams was not a concern of the JOC.29
(Empowering Women in Sports, The
Empowering Women Series, No. 4; A Publication of the Feminist
Majority Foundation, 1995)
