Why women gymnasts compete to music in their floor routines but men don't

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When Olympic gymnasts compete Sunday and Monday in the individual floor exercises in Tokyo, viewers will notice a key difference between the events.

The women will leap and flip and tumble to recorded music. The men's routines will be accompanied by silence.

The reason for the disparity dates back almost a century, when female gymnasts competed for the first time at the Olympics and rules for their events were established. Experts in gymnastics say expectations for female athletes were different then.

But even though women gymnasts today are more powerful and athletic than their counterparts from the mid-1900s -- sometimes even doing things men can't do -- elements of dance, choreographed to music, remain a required component of their floor exercises.

In other words, women must perform their floor routines to music.

Some say it's time to do away with that rule.

Women gymnastics were traditionally expected to highlight grace and femininity

Male gymnasts competed in the Olympics for the first time in 1896. Women's gymnastics made its debut more than three decades later, in 1928.

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When women started competing, the sport was tailored to fit the preconceived gender roles at the time, experts say.

The British women's gymnastics team during the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, the first year female gymnasts competed in the Games.

Back then, men's gymnastics routines were expected to highlight strength while women's routines emphasized grace and femininity, said Georgia Cervin, a former international gymnast and author of "Degrees of Difficulty: How Women's Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace."

"When the sport was developed for women, they adapted the men's sport to make it 'appropriate' for women," Cervin said. "Women were expected to do soft, rhythmic, flowing, graceful movements that emphasized beauty and flexibility. This is why they perform to music, and the men don't. Men's floor routines were expected to emphasize strength instead."

Female gymnasts also started competing in the Olympics at a time when competitive sports were overwhelmingly seen as masculine.

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