Medals and Mindsets: How Women’s Olympic Competitiveness Advances Gender Equality by Heng Chen

Join us for the latest Applied Economics Research Seminar Series event, Spring Term 2026.

Heng Chen, from the University of Hong Kong, will present this week's seminar on Medals and Mindsets: How Women’s Olympic Competitiveness Advances Gender Equality.

Abstract

Can female athletic success reshape beliefs about women’s competitive capacity and advance gender equality? We study this question in the context of China’s return to the Olympics, combining comprehensive athlete records from 1984–2004 with detailed census data. Exploiting variation in the timing of each prefecture’s first female Olympic medalist and differential exposure across birth cohorts, we find that hometown female medalists significantly narrow gender gaps in educational attainment, while male medalists produce no comparable effects. To address potential endogeneity, we employ a Bartik-style instrument leveraging the 1991 Soviet collapse as an exogenous shock to medal opportunities across sports. We further show that media coverage framing female achievements as evidence of women’s competitiveness helps explain these effects, and that female medalists shift fathers’ beliefs about daughters’ competitive capacity rather than directly inspiring girls. Taken together, our findings suggest that publicized female success can challenge gender stereotypes and promote equality.

The seminar will begin with a presentation and will end with a Q and A session.

It will be held in the Economics Common Room at 2pm on Thursday, 5 March 2026. This event is open to all levels of study and is also open to the public. To register your place and gain access to the webinar, please contact the seminar organisers.

This event is part of the Applied Economics Research Seminar Series.