Gender Inequality and Women's Gymnastics – Redux

Click the image to enlarge it.

My first post about gender inequality went awry, but no matter! In writing the original post, I thought of an even more interesting question about gender inequality and women's gymnastics.

When it comes to women's gymnastics, does gender inequality pose a barrier to entry? Is there some kind of threshold for inequality – a point where it becomes increasingly more difficult for women to participate in major competitions?

 Let's discuss the graph above. 

What is the GII?

The United Nations has developed a gender inequality index (GII), which takes into consideration things like adolescent birth rates, labor market participation by gender, and proportion of parliament seats occupied by women. 

If you want to read more about this index, I suggest that you hop over to the UN's website.

To create this chart, I took every country from the UN's database, eliminating the countries that didn't have an index score for 2013. (Sorry, Hong Kong. Sorry, Liechtenstein. Sorry, Brunei Darussalam. Sorry, Andorra.)

Then, I looked to see if the countries on the U.N. list had women compete at the 2014 World Championships.

Understanding the Graph

When you look at the chart, you'll see countries that had women participants in the World Championships at the very top. (They're coded 1.) The countries that didn't have any women participants appear at the bottom. (They're coded 0.)

The countries with more gender inequality are farther to the right. That's where you see countries like Afghanistan (0.705),  Chad (0.707), Niger (0.709), and Yemen (0.733).

Countries with more gender equality appear farther to the right. That's where you see countries like Slovenia (0.021), Switzerland (0.030), Germany (0.046), Sweden (0.054), and Austria (0.056).

Fun fact: Of the top 5 countries, with the least amount of gender inequality, only Slovenia didn't send a women's gymnastics representative to Nanning. (If I somehow missed the Slovenian gymnast, please let me know. The SVN abbreviation isn't showing up in the searchable PDFs.)

Because I'm sure that you're dying to know, here are the index scores for the Big 4:

China: 0.202

U.S.: 0.262

Russia: 0.314

Romania: 0.320

General Observations about the Graph

When you look along the bottom of the graph, you'll see that the red dots gradually get more frequent.

When you hit the 0.4 mark, BAM! The individual dots get almost impossible to decipher. Disney's 101 Dalmatians couldn't compete with this graph between the 0.4 and 0.6 mark. That means that a lot of countries with a gender inequality index of 0.4 to 0.6 didn't send women to Nanning.

What's interesting is that there are a few countries in the 0.4 to 0.6 range that did participate in the 2014 Worlds. These include:

Brazil (0.441)

Colombia (0.460)

South Africa (0.461)

Venezuela (0.464)

Panama (0.506)

Qatar (0.524)

India (0.563)

Egypt (0.580)

Gymternet Discussion Question 1:

Why do you think that these countries have sent women gymnasts to the World Championships?

For your reference, other countries with similar GII index scores include:

Ecuador (0.429)

Jamaica (0.457)

Morocco (0.460)

Indonesia (0.500)

Iran (0.510)

Guatemala (0.523)

Why does this silly chart matter?

1. History

Hold onto your seats. I'm about to make a sweeping generalization.

In a society with more gender inequality, women tend to get fewer opportunities outside the home. As countries develop and attitudes toward women change, the opportunities for women increase (and the societal attitudes towards women being physical become more liberal).

This problem isn't unique to gymnastics, but as a man who lives in the United States and who travels to Europe, I often forget this. And I'm guessing that some of my readers do the same.

2. The FIG

It's no secret that the FIG is trying to increase the diversity in the sport. If I were Bruno Grandi, I'd look at this chart and ask myself:

How can we encourage more participation from women around the world? Is there something that we can do, or do we have to wait for history to run its course?

I'd also look at some of the countries in the 0.15 and 0.4 range to see where the "lowest hanging fruit" is. That is, which of those countries are most likely to participate – if the FIG just gave them a little nudge.

Croatia (0.172), for example, didn't send any women gymnasts to Nanning, yet their country sends male gymnasts. The same could be said of Thailand (0.364).

Gymternet Discussion Question 2:

What can the FIG do to encourage the participation of more women from around the world? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

3. The Gymternet

I understand that gender inequality is a really complex issue. It's not an easy problem to solve, and I don't mean to suggest that gender inequality is the only thing preventing women from participating at major competitions like the World Championships.

With that caveat out of the way, I do think that the gymternet needs to spend more time thinking about the place of gymnastics in the world. We're extremely focused on the minutiae, on D and E scores, on who got chosen for a team, etc. And, yes, there's a time and place for that.

But we (myself included) often forget to think about gymnastics in a larger context. This post ultimately seeks to open up that conversation.

So, gymternet! Discuss Away!

Final Notes for the Stats Nerds:

This is a blog – not an academic article. So, I'm not going to create a table with all the details of β, SE β, etc.

Here are a few points from R:

Pr(>|z|) for the Participation variable: 0.00724

Null deviance: 25.689  on 151  degrees of freedom

Residual deviance: 17.867  on 150  degrees of freedom

1-pchisq(25.689-17.867, 151-150) = 0.005161405

So, I'd say that this line of research is something that is worth exploring more. If doing this type of research were my full-time job, I'd…

• Look at data from more competitions – If I could, I'd go back in time to see the evolution of this phenomenon
• Run the same kind of analysis, but look at whether the countries participated in the team competition
• See if there are similar trends on the men's side
• Explore more variables that could affect women's gymnastics