Female Chinese Olympians Are Dominant

China is putting up its best appearance at the summer Olympics since it started regularly participating in them in 1984. Surprisingly, a major source of that strength is the performance of China's female athletes. They have won 46 out of the country's 79 medals including 25 of 45 gold medals.

And this is no anomaly. Among nations that typically win big at the Olympics (like Russia and the U.S.), China is the only one where women consistently out-medal their male counterparts. The following chart shows the number of medals won by male and female athletes at summer Olympics since 1992.

In comparison, since 1992, U.S. men have won an average of 17 more medals than U.S. women in summer Olympics. (This year, however, the women have thus far built an eight-medal lead.)

For the Chinese, the feat isn't restricted to just warm weather sports. Of the 159 gold medals China has won in all Olympics, 92, or 58 percent, have gone to women.

Part of the reason for the feminine success may be the shear volume of female athletes China sends to the Olympics. It's probably the only big country that enters more female than male athletes.

The following chart shows the difference between the number of male and female athletes that both China (red) and the U.S. (blue) have sent to the summer Olympics since 1984.

It's hard to say what accounts for the Chinese female advantage. It could be compensation for the relative weakness of Chinese men, but the the men are actually doing quite well for themselves, having steadily increased their gold medal take in recent Olympiads (from 4 in 1992 to 20 thus far in 2008). Another explanation may be that women are better trained than men, but that doesn't seem likely either. It also may be that the Chinese government has devoted more resources to training female athletes than other countries have.

Work by economist Michael Klein of Tufts University suggests that China's success can be partly attributed to the economic opportunities the country's women have in general. In this paper, Klein found a link between the success of a country's female teams in international sporting events and that country's female labor force participation. And that links appears to exist for China too, with a high 65 to 70 percent of its women working.

All of this paints a weird picture of China: Despite its one-child policy which has helped the male-female ratio grow decidedly in favor of males, Chinese women are showing the world that they're more than able to compete.

(Credit: Xiao Yong/Imaginechina)