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So much for a level playing field.
As if the Tokyo Olympics didn’t have enough hurdles to leap over, what with the ongoing global pandemic causing people to question whether the postponed 2020 Games should still go on this summer, now there are calls for the president of the organizing committee to resign over alleged sexist remarks.
Yoshiro Mori, a former prime minister of Japan, was speaking to members of the Japanese Olympic Committee on Wednesday — with reporters present — when he was asked to comment on the plan to increase the number of female board members to more than 40%.
He reportedly responded by saying that board meetings with a lot of women in them take longer because women talk more, which is “annoying.”
“ “You have to regulate [women’s] speaking time to some extent, or else we’ll never be able to finish.” ”
“When you increase the number of female executive members, if their speaking time isn’t restricted to a certain extent, they have difficulty finishing, which is annoying,” said Mori, 83, according to an Agence France-Presse translation of a story reported in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
“Women are competitive,” he continued. “When one person raises a hand, others think they need to speak up, as well. That’s why everyone speaks.”
“You have to regulate speaking time to some extent,” he added. “Or else we’ll never be able to finish.”
Oh, but the current female Olympic Committee members are the exception to the rule, apparently, because they know their place. “We have about seven women at the organizing committee, but everyone understands their place,” Mori said.
Related: Over 80% of people say Tokyo Olympics should be called off or won’t happen
Yet many women would argue that they actually struggle to get a word in edgewise during meetings. An often-cited study of several university faculty meetings by communications researchers Barbara and Gene Eakins found that men spoke more often during meetings, and they also spoke longer. In fact, the longest comment by any woman at the seven meetings surveyed was still shorter than the shortest comment by a man. And a 2017 study commissioned by Bloomberg analyzed more than 155,000 company conference calls over 19 years, and found that men spoke 92% of the time on them.
And even when women do speak in meetings, they tend to be interrupted more often than their male counterparts get cut off. Several studies of differences in speech patterns between genders since the 1970s have found that men are more likely to interrupt other people — and they interrupt women the most. This is why Vice President Kamala Harris made headlines for telling then-VP Mike Pence “I am speaking” when he talked over her during their debate last October.
The sexist statements led to calls on Twitter for Mori to resign, with some readers noting that discrimination against women (or discrimination in any form, be it over race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation) goes against the Olympic Charter.
These aren’t Mori’s first controversial remarks. During a January 2000 interview, for example, he said “I felt like I had AIDS” after greeting farmers during a 1969 election campaign. He later apologized. And while musing over U.S. preparedness for the Y2K bug in February 2020, he offended Americans by stating, “When there is a blackout, the murderers always come out. It’s that type of society.” BBC News called him “one of Japan’s most unpopular leaders in years” at the time, citing these and other problematic statements.
