Women keep winning Olympic gold. Men still get more of the buzz.

The U.S. women’s hockey team will celebrate their 2026 Olympic gold win with Flavor Flav and guest female athletes in Las Vegas in July.

The rapper confirmed that the invitation came after President Trump joked with the U.S. men’s hockey team, who also won Olympic gold, that he was obligated to invite the women’s team to the White House.

In a video captured on Sunday, the president congratulated the men’s team during a phone call, while FBI Director Kash Patel chugged beer in the locker room with the Olympians and posed with the team’s gold medals. The team accepted Trump’s invitation to attend Tuesday’s State of the Union address, followed by a visit to the White House on Wednesday. (All but five players went.)

“I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that? I do believe I would probably be impeached,” Trump joked over the phone, with subsequent laughter from the men. The clip spread widely on social media, sparking a flurry of criticism that the joke diminished the women’s achievement and that the president’s invitation was an afterthought.

The women’s team declined the invite to the State of the Union, citing academic and professional commitments, but hasn’t decided whether it will visit the White House.

Hilary Knight, captain of the U.S. women’s team, called the president’s comment “distasteful and unfortunate” at a press conference on Wednesday. “I think just the way women are represented, it’s a great teaching point and really shines light on how women should be championed for their amazing feats.”

The U.S. women’s hockey team has earned the same number of Olympic gold medals more than three times as fast as the men’s team, and U.S. women athletes overall have been bringing in more Olympic medals than the men in recent years. Women’s Olympic events are also on an upward trend of getting more attention than men’s sports during primetime broadcast coverage.

So, even when women dominate at the Olympics, why aren’t they valued the same way?

Two scholars who study gender and sports spoke to Yahoo to shed some light on the matter.

The numbers behind women’s dominance

Men’s ice hockey was established as an event at the first Winter Olympics in 1924, while women’s hockey didn’t make its debut until 1998. Since then, the women have medaled in every Winter Olympics. It has taken the men 102 years to earn 3 Olympic gold medals, while the women have achieved the same number of medals in just 28 years.

When looking at the 12 gold medals Team USA won in the 2026 Games, six were won by women and two others were won by mixed teams.

“The USA owes its medal haul, both gold medals and overall medals, to the women,” C.A. Tuggle, a John H. Stembler Jr. distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina Hussman school of Journalism and Media, tells Yahoo.

Tuggle, who has been charting gender-based primetime Olympics coverage for 25 years, says, “There’s a definite upward trend in the women getting more attention.”

A recent study found that women’s sports drew more coverage for the sixth Olympic Games in a row at the 2026 Winter Games. Women’s sports received 42.43% of the coverage, while men’s received 41.33% and the remainder featured a mixture of men’s and women’s events at 16.24%, according to researchers James Angelini of the University of Delaware and Paul MacArthur at Utica University.

Tuggle says that one of the most interesting findings from his research is that the countries that are more successful at the Olympics aren’t necessarily the wealthier or historically dominant nations, but rather those that send more women athletes. “The percentage of women on the team had more of an impact than any of those factors,” he explains.

While numbers matter, there’s still more to the story

Even as women athletes are winning more gold medals and starting to receive more exposure during primetime Olympic broadcast coverage, the framing of their performance differs from that of men, according to Cheryl Cooky, a Purdue University professor who studies the intersections of gender, sport and media.

“Numbers matter,” Cooky tells Yahoo, “but they don’t tell the entire story.”

“What we tend to see often is women athletes represented in very stereotypical ways. We see women’s sports dismissed in different ways,” she explains.

Cooky says the president’s comments about the women’s hockey team “illustrate one example among many of the ways in which women’s sports get demeaned, marginalized or trivialized.”

She points to the 2007 NCAA women’s Final Four tournament as another example, when Rutgers overcame a midseason slump to reach the Final Four for the second time ever. While they were ultimately defeated by Tennessee, their Cinderella success story was overshadowed in the media by racist and sexist comments made by syndicated radio host Don Imus, who was later fired.

“We went and analyzed the mainstream print news media coverage of the tournament, and then the sample that we had selected, there was in fact two to three times more coverage of Don Imus’s comments about the Rutgers team than there was on the actual tournament itself,” Cooky explains.

“This is an ongoing pattern where oftentimes it’s the controversy that garners and generates more content, more coverage, more conversation than the actual event itself,” Cooky says. That’s why she says it’s unfortunate that the president’s comments are what people will remember most about the 2026 Olympic women’s hockey team.

“The fact that women athletes like the U.S. women’s hockey team, or the USWNT, have been able to accomplish as much as they have with fewer resources, less pay, minimal media coverage, etc., is a testament to the commitment, talent and resilience of these athletes. And for that we should all be celebrating their achievements,” Cooky says.

As president, Trump’s words carry significant weight. “For this individual to be speaking of women athletes in this type of way really sheds light on the extensive misogyny that is shaping the worldview of our highest leaders in office,” Cooky says, adding that she’s also concerned about what young girls and boys might take away from the comments.

“It sends girls the message that they are inferior or that they don’t belong or that sports are about men,” she adds.

For the boys, “they can take away two messages,” Cooky says. “One is that girls’ sports, and thereby girls, don’t matter, and two, boys and men are better than women.”

How a history of exclusion lingers in women’s sports today

Cooky points to the roots of modern sport, which she says emphasized masculinity and socialized boys and men into a particular ideal.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, organized sports were seen as a remedy to a perceived “crisis of masculinity,” and women were largely left out, she says. That legacy lingers in various ways today.

“We don’t gender-mark men’s sports,” Cooky points out, providing examples of the NBA vs. the WNBA and the PGA vs. the LPGA. “That conveys to people that the norm is men.”

Tuggle, who worked in local television sports in the 1990s, experienced this firsthand. “There was just a decided emphasis on the professional male sports — football, basketball, baseball, ice hockey,” he says. “That’s what many of us grew up watching.”

Exposure to women’s sports matters because it can change perceptions, Tuggle says. “Having your eyes opened to the very competitive and entertaining nature of women’s sports makes a difference.”