What Goes into a Medal: Women's Inclusion and Success at the Olympic Games

An Old Boys Club No More

“…These results also hold in uncensored estimations. This lends credence to the initial findings reported in Noland and Stahler (2014), showing that the doping effect may not only have been enormous for East Germany but also have more importance for female performance where the performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) program was concentrated. However, when combined with a lagged-dependent variable, the doping effect frequently disappears.…”

“…Additionally, we include dummy variables to control for whether an NOC was the host of the Olympic Games Host it or if it hosted the previous Games PostHost it , whether it is currently a member of the communist bloc CommBloc it and whether the NOC participated in one of the major boycott years of 1980 and 1984 Boycott t . Finally, motivated by the finding of an extremely powerful “doping” effect for East Germany at the height of its Olympic prowess (Noland & Stahler, 2014), we add a control for East Germany between 1976 and 1988, which proxies for a doping dummy Dope it as well as the East German fixed effect EG i . 9…”

“…There is a growing body of empirical research on the Olympics: Some of this work (Bernard & Busse, 2004; Celik & Gius, 2014; Johnson & Ali, 2004; Lui & Suen, 2008) has tested the determinants of total NOC medal outcomes at the Summer Games, while related efforts have focused on the performance of particular regions (Hoffmann, Lee, & Ramasamy, 2004). 4 Other researchers (Klein, 2004; Leeds & Leeds, 2012; Lowen, Deaner, & Schmitt, 2014; Noland & Stahler, 2014) studied female athletic inclusion and success specifically. A third group of researchers have statistically modeled outcomes for the Winter Games (Pfau, 2006) and for individual sports (Balmer, Nevill, & Williams, 2001, 2003; Tcha & Pershin, 2003; Otamendi & Doncel, 2014).…”

“… 5. Nowhere is the difference between average male and female performance more profound than East Germany, which on average only took 10% of male medals throughout their five performances at the Summer Games and an astounding 25% of the female-event medals. However, these differentials have been ascribed to a systematic doping policy, which specifically targeted East German female athletes (Noland & Stahler, 2014). …”

“… 6. For a detailed accounting of the general data building process, including data sources, assumptions made to include historical Soviet Union-era countries, data limitations, and statistical modeling issues, see the data appendix in Noland and Stahler (2014). In general, we acknowledge here that our data panel is necessarily unbalanced by the very nature of the Olympic movement, as more countries join the Games throughout the sampling period and historical countries like East Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics cease to exist.…”