This year's Olympic Games were a tour to force for American women, bringing home 26 gold

medals and racking up 17 more medals than the men.

When Paris last hosted the games in 1924, just over 4% of the 3,000 total

competitors were women. A century later, the International Olympic Committee

dubbed the 2024 the gender equal Olympics

saying they'd have a 50-50 allocation of male and female athletes competing.

But that doesn't tell the whole story.

For a deeper look, let's bring in Cheryl Cookie, a professor of American studies and women's gender and sexuality studies at Purdue University.

Professor Cookie remind us how far the Olympics have come.

For many, many decades, women athletes

were marginalized.

They were treated as subpar in comparison to the men.

Yes, if we look at the history of the Modern Olympic Games, the first game was held

in 1896 and the founder at that time espoused really sexist and misogynist beliefs

about women and women's capabilities to engage in physicality and athletic participation.

Certainly he was not alone in those beliefs.

And so the struggle for equality, equal opportunity, and inclusion has not been necessarily a linear one, but certainly I think we've come a long way in terms of expanding opportunities across the globe with respect to

participation for athletes.

Sure, I just want to put up this graph just to give viewers a sense of the

improvement as measured as the proportion of

participation between male and female athletes and in this graph you can see that

steadily over time there's been an increase leading up to this Olympics

...