Olympic Medals Tell a Story on Gender Equity

“The success of individual Olympic athletes reflects many factors including raw talent, dedication, training, effort, experience, and even luck,” wrote Michael Klein, professor of economic affairs, in an EconoFact memo published last week. 

EconoFact, a project of the Edward R. Murrow Center for Global Diplomacy, is a non-partisan publication designed to bring key facts and incisive analysis to the national debate on economic and social policies. Klein’s analysis of countries’ Olympic medal hauls has a powerful story to tell: higher female workforce participation draws a direct line to the number of women’s medals a country wins. 

“It is possible to predict with some accuracy the relative overall performance of countries’ athletes in a cross-national comparison of medals won,” Klein continued. “Characteristics such as population size and a nation’s wealth certainly play a role. Other factors, such as whether the country is hosting the games, can give native athletes a boost. Additionally, the success of a country’s women in Olympic competition is representative of broader gender equity in that country.”

The memo revisits a paper Klein authored in 2000, which found a correlation between women’s labor force participation and the number of women’s medals won in the Sydney Olympics. Ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics, which begin in Paris on Friday, Klein used his model to assess countries’ outcomes at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The Olympic Cost of Discrimination 

As founder and executive editor of EconoFact, Klein uses economics to understand a number of issues, from immigration to the environment and inflation. He first became interested in the overlap of gender equity and sports when he was listening to a radio program on the women’s world cup. He became curious about the relationship between workforce participation and athletic outcomes and dove into his work.

“It was the fastest paper I ever wrote in my life,” said Klein. “I had a first draft in three weeks, and that involved collecting all the data, figuring out the regression specification, and honing in on what the question would be.”

In his analysis, he assessed several hypotheses. If women were working, maybe their fertility rates were lower, and that provided them a longer span of time to pursue athletics. Or if there were more women in government, perhaps more resources were devoted to women's sports. Through his analysis, however, his initial hypothesis bore out, and he could show empirically that labor force participation correlated with women’s success in the Olympic games.

“I was able to isolate this gender equality effect, and show that it was really important for sports,” he said, “but it has a wider implication.”

“There's this very long history in economics of talking about how discrimination is costly because you aren't drawing on the best people or you aren't serving the biggest market,” he added. “I realized that this paper spoke to that in a somewhat indirect way, because there's something that you can measure: women's success in the World Cup or in the Olympics.”

An Economic Outlook on Social Issues

The cost of discrimination, Klein notes, is an old idea in economics, going back to Milton Friedman, who argued that because discrimination was costly it wouldn’t persist. While his memo on the Olympics illustrates the benefits of an inclusive labor force, Klein notes that another reality is also true. 

“This research demonstrates that discrimination itself is costly, but then why does it persist?” he said. “That's the other half of the story.”

In another EconoFact memo, Trevon D. Logan wrote about how discrimination against Black Americans was able to thrive in a free market.

“While the market may punish firms who discriminate,” wrote Logan, “the market is powerless when consumers are the ones who value discrimination. If consumers have discriminatory tastes, they are willing to pay for discrimination. And the profit maximizing firm will make more profit by being discriminatory.”

Through bringing together an array of perspectives at EconoFact, Klein sees that economic scholars can shed light on a myriad of social issues today.

“Economics is sometimes accused of being an imperial science; economists talk about everything from the environment to racism, to standard things like monetary and fiscal policy to family choice and fertility issues,” he said. “Economics is not the be-all and end-all, but it has a lot of insights to offer on these issues.”

“We want to bring the best scholarship in economics to the public at large, and that tends to cover a very wide range of issues with public policy implications,” he added. “I'm pleased that with EconoFact we can present to the public the wide range of things that economists have contributed to people's understanding of these issues, help them understand the economy and society, and make better informed choices at the polling booth.”

Read more about Fletcher’s international economic relations field of study.