A Win-Win Game Plan

Christian Jarrett highlights a study suggesting that in “countries with greater gender equality … both women and men tend to perform better at the Olympics.” What researchers found when they compared Sochi medal results with World Bank data for 121 countries:

The key finding is that countries with more gender equality, especially in terms of educational equality, tended to achieve more Olympic medals among their female and male athletes. This association held true even after controlling for wealth and population size and income inequality. Income inequality was also associated with medal success (greater income inequality correlated with fewer medals), but income inequality and gender inequality were not correlated with each other, and each had an independent association with medals gained.

[Researcher Jennifer] Berdahl and her colleagues said that their results contradict the argument that striving for equality for women means inevitably that men will lose out. “Rather, gender inequality is likely to hurt both women and men by encouraging stereotypes that limit their ability to reach their full potential as individuals,” they concluded. “Eroding false and antiquated norms regarding what men and women can and cannot do is a ‘win-win’ that allows members of both genders to realize their true potential.”