Paul Rouse: Women struggling to have their voices heard in corridors of Olympic power

Yoshiro Mori, the president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, speaks at a news conference last week. He came under scrutiny for comments made about women serving in board positions in organising committees. Picture: AP

The words of the head of the Tokyo Organising Committee for this year’s Olympic Games, Yoshiro Mori, left no doubt of how he views women. He told a meeting of the Japanese Olympic Committee board of trustees: “If we increase the number of female board members, we have to make sure their speaking time is restricted somewhat, they have difficulty finishing, which is annoying.”

To underline his point Mori also said: “We have about seven women at the organising committee but everyone understands their place.”

There was an outcry in response to these comments and Mori gave a press conference. That was a fascinating spectacle. Mori began by saying that his words were against the “Olympic Spirit” and were inappropriate:

For that, I feel deep remorse and I would like to retract my remarks. I also want to apologise to the people I offended.

But what came next undermined the sincerity of that apology Mori explained that he made the remarks at the Japan Olympic Committee because “they came to me for advice. And on personnel matters I told JOC (chief Yasuhiro) Yamashita that if you get too hung up on the government’s numbers under their governance code you could face difficulties in management. In that backdrop, I told him about what I had heard from other organisations (about the difficulty of having women on their board) and made those remarks.”

In other words, having to put too many woman on any Board makes management more difficult and Mori knew that, not just from personal experience, but from the sentiment shared by others who ran organisations that had women on their boards. By any measure, the Japanese boardroom is a deeply sexist place, something that is routinely set out in international comparative studies.

Mori was then asked whether he thought that women talked too long, and he replied: “I don’t listen to women lately so I don’t really know... I talk long too.”

Finally, asked whether he thought it was appropriate that he stay as head of the Tokyo organising committee for the Olympic Games, Mori said: “Who knows. What do you think?” Basically, this was a pose that was ultimately dismissive of his critics.

In the wider world of sport; there is nothing new about institutional discrimination against women in sport. And there is no better way to demonstrate the trajectory of this discrimination than examining the Olympic movement.

For an organisation which, from the beginning, exhibited a remarkable capacity to swaddle itself in all manner of rhetoric of international amity, its treatment of women has been outrageous.

The modern Olympics were, of course, founded by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French Anglophile; it was Baron de Coubertin who trumpeted the famous line: “The important thing is not winning but taking part.”

But he was only talking about men in that partaking.

As regards women, he expounded his general views when he said such things as: “The eternal role of woman in this world was to be a companion of the male and mother of the family, and she should be educated towards those functions.”

And when de Coubertin was asked why he did not plan to include women in the first Olympic Games, he argued that women’s sport was “against the laws of nature.” He said also: “The games must be reserved for men for the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism with female applause as a reward.”

At the first modern Olympic Games in Athens 1896, no women competed, as de Coubertin felt that their inclusion would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and incorrect.”

Every human being must be afforded the opportunity to change and to recognise that the views once held have become outdated.

But even after women had been allowed into the Olympic Games in a limited way, de Coubertin was not for turning. He said in 1935: “I personally am against the participation of women in public competition… At the Olympics their primary role should be like the ancient tournaments – the crowning of victors with laurels.”

Such perceptions were widespread across the Olympic movement: The American Avery Bundage, who replaced de Coubertin as President in 1949 said: “I think women’s events should be confined to those appropriate for women – swimming, tennis, figure skating and fencing, but certainly not shot-putting.”

So what was women’s involvement?

Women first competed at the 1900 Paris Games. Six women were allowed to compete in lawn tennis and golf. There was a total of 1,060 men competing in Paris.

Female participation in the Olympic games remained exceptionally small, usually symbolic, and restricted to “light” sports.

When swimming and diving competitions were held in the 1912 Games, one official resigned in protest of the “indecency” of the female participants.

Eventually, in 1928, were track and field events allowed. But there were only five permitted events and the longest was the 800m. It was deemed to be inappropriate and distressing by the IOC and that distance was not run again until 1960.

And in that year – 1960 – women were still only taking part in 44 out of the 150 events at the summer games.

There was a slow increase in female participation over the remaining decades of the 20th century. By 1980, 20% of the competitors in the Olympics were women and by 2000, the numbers had risen beyond 30%.

Winter Games

The winter Olympics were similarly imbalanced in terms of gender participation.

When the first winter Olympics were staged in 1924, only 11 of the 258 competitors were women. Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1936 games that women were allowed to compete in anything other than figure skating. By 1994, the percentage of women in the Winter Games still stood at just 30%.

There has been progress in a new millennium and, with all sports in the Olympic programme now allowing women to compete, by 2016 some 45% of entrants in the Rio Games were women.

All of this helped the International Olympic Committee to congratulate itself in a Gender Equality Report in 2018 that it “has made great progress in promoting gender equality in terms of balancing the total number of athletes participating at the Games, offering leadership development, advocacy and awareness campaigns, and more recently appointing more women to leadership roles within administration and governance.”

To be fair, there has been huge progress made in terms of athlete participation. The ‘Gender Equality Report’, in seeking to build on this, set out a clear roadmap across 25 recommendations which – if followed – would go a long way towards delivering gender equality across the Olympic movement.

For example, the recommendation that there be balanced gender representation of coaches selected to participate at the Games comes in the wake of statistics which show that just 11% of coaches at Rio 2016 were women.

And then there is Recommendation 18: “The IOC to establish strategic mechanisms to increase the pipeline of female candidates for governance roles in general as well as for executive board positions.”

The report also noted: “A longstanding challenge for organisations is identifying and recruiting women who are interested in taking on governance roles.”

For the IOC, there is huge inequality at senior management and director level. And of the IOC’s Executive Board, there are just four women as against 11 men.

This is obviously a legacy of the past, but it is also a reflection of enduring attitudes in the present.

Which brings us back to Yoshiro Mori and Tokyo.

He should have been told immediately and publicly by the men who run the Olympic movement, led by its President Thomas Bach, that he had to go. He wasn’t.

Instead, it has been the response of the volunteers who have resigned and the sponsors who themselves are under public pressure, that has left Mori with the imperative of resigning – something he proclaimed he would not do.

- Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin.