Just before I crawled into bed last night, I read an opinion piece that looked at our success at the Olympics.

It was on the Spinoff website, and written by the very good writer, Madeleine Chapman.

She argues the point that if we're to chase Olympic medals in future then what we should do is invest a greater degree of our high performance funding in women.

She breaks it down from an economic perspective, and looks at what our women have achieved, while - Chapman says - being under-funded in some cases.

She says women have, over the last eight years, received a slow but steady increase in funding, so lets look at how that has influenced results.

So lets look first at Beijing in 2008 - our men won seven medals, women won two. In 2012, in London, men won eight medals, women won five. And this year in Rio, of the 18 medals we won, men won seven medals, our women won eleven.

So with less funding, our women really excelled in Rio.

And what Chapman argues is that makes women a better Olympic investment. If medals are your focus, women can achieve more with less money.

Now, before all you misogynists out there start sending me dead rats in the post, can I just point out that I'm not suggesting women's funding should come at the expense of men's. I am merely pointing out what Chapman has highlighted in her column. You get good bang for your buck when you invest in female athletes.

Why is that? I don't know. Some of the sports don't require - some would argue - as much funding. Cycling, for example, received $26 million in high performance funding and our men's team won silver.

Compare that with Luuka Jones who won silver in the canoe slalom and her sport received less than a million in the last four years.

If you want to compare like with like, then look at our Sevens team. Our women's team received less funding then the men, and the men came away with nothing and the women won silver.

The question for me is this - do we, hand on heart, value high performance female athletes in the same way we value men? And if the answer is yes, then we need to throw more cash at them.

We need to be finding and funding the Eliza McCartney's of the world. A young woman, just 19, who pole-vaulted herself and our country into possibly one of New Zealand's great moments of these Olympic games.

We need to offer young women the pathways to sport - and into a greater variety of sports - instead of handing them a netball skirt at school and telling them that's as good as it gets. Netball is a great sport, but it's a dead-end sport. It takes you nowhere on a world stage, and that we consistently channel young girls towards netball is one of our great failures I think.

In Rio, our women proved what they can achieve with some funding, some encouragement and a push in the right direction.

The challenge now is not treat this as a golden year for our women at the Olympic games, but to use it as a springboard to achieve far more in the future - and that starts with investing a great deal more in our women.