Paris 2024: Is less than 40% of women on the Refugee Olympic Team enough?

Slightly more than a third of the Refugee Olympic Team at the Paris Games are women, as female representation has continued to decline since the team’s creation in 2015.

However, the 38% rate of women on the team is not the only drop registered. The Refugee Paralympic Team has less than 13% women.

The number of refugees has tripled in the last decade. At the end of last year, there were 43.4 million refugees globally, according to the UNHCR refugee agency.

Around half of refugees, internally displaced or stateless people are women and girls. 

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) emphasises that the event will be the first gender-equal one in history.

Yet, individual sports cases reveal a different story from the reality of the bigger picture.

For Michele Donnelly, associate professor in the Department of Sport Management at Brock University, the IOC is “not meeting their own commitment to gender equality,” especially since they cannot enforce it in a team they have control over.

“I would say it is more symbolic than an actual representation of the issues globally,” Michele Donnelly adds.

According to the charity Women for Women International, “in addition to poverty and other issues that all refugees may face, women refugees have an added layer of oppression from gender discrimination.”

This layer can be seen as “unpaid work in the home, whether that's childcare, caring for older relatives, cooking, cleaning”, says Rachel Williams, policy and public affairs manager at the charity Women in Sport. 

The current Refugee Olympic Team has 29 athletes, with only 10 women on the team.

Manizha Talash, a 21-year-old Afghan woman who will contend in breakdance in a first-ever Olympic competition after fleeing to Spain from the Taliban,