The long road to Olympic equality for women

livemint.com:

Next week’s Summer Olympics in Paris will be the first in which equal numbers of female and male athletes participate. The milestone is owed in large part to an International Olympic Committee working group started in 2018 that established specific benchmarks for achieving gender parity.

But it has been a long road to equality since Pierre de Coubertin started the modern Olympic Games in 1896, declaring that they would celebrate “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism…with the applause of women as reward." Women, he was fond of noting, had just one job in sports, “that of the role of crowning the winner with garlands." Despite the widely held belief that women’s bodies weren’t cut out for the kind of strain that came with athletic competition, female athletes soon began to find ways to participate in the Olympics. In 1896, a woman ran in the first-ever Olympic marathon—she just did it without permission.

In 1900, women competed in tennis and golf. But the first major steps toward gender equality in Olympic track and field events weren’t made until the 1920s, thanks to Alice Milliat, who started some of the first women’s sports leagues in France and the first international women’s sporting federation.

When Milliat asked for women’s track and field events to be a part of the Olympics, she was summarily ignored. Not one to give up easily, she founded her own competition, the Women’s Olympic Games, first held in Paris in 1922, with women from five nations participating in 11 track and field events.

Flying in the face of the men who claimed no one wanted to see women athletes compete, 20,000 spectators showed up to watch. But the only response from the International Olympic Committee was to demand that Milliat