Women athletes say the work isn't over after Olympics gender parity

PARIS : Women athletes taking part in a fashion show in Paris to mark gender parity at the Olympics welcomed the Games reaching that milestone but said more work needs to be done to improve working conditions, pay, and visibility of women in sports.

Former and current athletes including beach volleyball gold medallist Natalie Cook, BMX racer Sarah Walker, and U.S. middle-distance runner Athing Mu walked the catwalk in T-shirts with slogans like "Parity Paris" and "I Am".

Paris 2024 is the first Olympics in which an equal number of men and women are competing overall, but the split still varies widely by country and by sport. Paris is also where women first took part in the Olympics, in 1900, when the 22 participating women accounted for just 2 per cent of the total.

"Honestly there needs to be more work done to protect women in sports," Ebony Morrison, who will represent Liberia in the 100-metre hurdles, told Reuters in an interview.

"We're dealing with the outfits that we wear, the harassment online, sometimes we're not in safe spaces with the people that are supposed to be there to help us, like our doctors, our coaches, so there really needs to be more done," she added.

The fashion world has taken a renewed interest in women athletes ahead of the Paris Games, with U.S. sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson featured on the cover of Vogue magazine earlier this month, and Marie Claire magazine publishing a Women in Sports issue featuring basketball player A'ja Wilson.

More than half the content on Olympics.com and on Olympics social channels is dedicated to women, Olympic Broadcasting Services CEO Yiannis Exarchos told journalists in a press conference on Sunday.

"I don't think that there are many sports platforms, and especially