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Women on Ice: The Slow Battle to Diversify Hockey Media

As women become increasingly visible in the hockey press and analytics community, the sport must move past macho posturing and old fashioned thinking.
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In 1970, Shirley Walton Fischler, the late wife of MSG Network analyst Stan Fischler, attempted to join the Professional Hockey Writers Association (PHWA), only to find that the group's constitution prohibited women from becoming members. She promptly filed a complaint with the New York Human Rights Commission. "I am sure that I am fully qualified in every other way," she told the Associated Press at the time.

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The next year, she became the first woman to cover hockey from the Madison Square Garden press box, writing for the Kingston Whig-Standard.

Forty-five years later, you'd assume things would be different. With initiatives like Title IX and the general progression of society, we must have moved on from a time when women were literally forbidden from writing about sports, right?

In many ways, yes. But the progress hasn't been as significant as you'd think.

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Women may be allowed in hockey press boxes, but you still won't see many there. Based on the lists available on the PHWA's website, only 25 of the organization's roughly 294 members are women. On television broadcasts, play-by-play and color commentators are exclusively male; women do feature in some broadcasts, but usually serve as anchors or supplemental reporters.

"I'd love for more of us to be taking the jobs that are out there," said Tracey Myers, who covers the Chicago Blackhawks for CSN Chicago and serves on the PHWA's executive board. "The jobs just aren't there like they used to be. Simple as that. Newspapers aren't hiring like they used to and even some of the main online publications aren't either. ESPN Chicago just cut a bunch of writers. Yahoo cut a friend of mine last spring. It's not that there's some editor out there saying, 'women aren't capable of doing this job.' Couldn't be further than the truth. I just don't think they have the jobs to offer anymore."

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Where you will find women writing about hockey is on the Internet, although they are usually not doing it professionally. Despite the tired clichés about writing from the basement, success in blogging depends on continued effort and quality work rather than credentialed access. Analytics writing, much of which is done at the amateur level, provides a chance to understand games in new ways and present fans with data that even the NHL itself doesn't offer.

The AHL Texas Stars got Carolyn Wilke hooked on hockey—and hockey analytics. Photo by Ross Bonander via Wikimedia.

But, when it comes down to it, most writers are motivated by the same factors regardless of their gender: love of hockey and a desire to understand, analyze, and generally explain the game.

Take, for example, Carolyn Wilke, who, despite currently serving as site manager and editor for Today's Slapshot, didn't get into sports until her mid-twenties.

"It was a bad year for my personal life, and I needed something to cheer about, so I turned to sports," she told VICE Sports via email. "I love the drama of games, and started following the English Premier League. My favorite team, Manchester City, chosen randomly because I love that color blue, ended up winning the championship that year and I was hooked."

From there, geography and the relative similarities between hockey and soccer helped Wilke transition to the ice. "I live really close to the Texas Stars, the Dallas Stars AHL affiliate, so I've loved going to hockey games live, but until I really understood puck movement, which watching soccer helped me learn, I hadn't been able to get 'into' watching hockey on TV," she said. "Then came the 2013 playoffs, and after the Blackhawks-Bruins series, you couldn't tear me away from hockey."

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Motivated by the fan base's perception of Stars defenseman Jordie Benn, Wilke began writing about hockey. Once she was engaged with the game and writing about it, it was a logical transition to drift towards the analytical side of things.

"I've always been an analytical person, and I worked in market forecasting analytics for a Fortune 500 company," she explained. "It was a pretty natural transition for me to see this game with all its moving parts and go 'ok, but why?"

Jen Lute-Costella, known to many on Twitter as Jen LC or RegressedPDO, followed a similar path as she moved from a casual fan to one of the top minds in hockey analytics.

"Over the summer between the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons, I started learning about 'fancy stats' as they were so often called then. I thought it was a cool way to gain more understanding of the game I had come to love," she wrote on her blog. "In late November of 2013, I had a bunch of thoughts in my head about hockey that were too long for Twitter so I created a blog on WordPress. I was just going to post that one thing and be done with it."

Instead, that led to a writing spot with SBNation. Then came plenty more writing gigs, instruction on tracking zone entries from Eric Tulsky (who is now working for the Carolina Hurricanes) and a rise to analytics prominence. Lute-Costella did not respond to requests for inclusion in this story.

Hockey nerd selfie with .— Shane O'Donnell (@shane1342o)February 13, 2016

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Hockey nerds, including Jen Lute-Costella and Carolyn Wilke

But regardless of women's collective success level—Myers is a professional reporter, Lute-Costella was reportedly on the radar of the Toronto Maple Leafs before she started her own analytics firm, and Wilke is a statistical consultant for the newly formed National Women's Hockey League—there are still plenty of men who still view hockey as their domain. And while just about everyone on the Internet gets trolled occasionally, it's different to be systemically devalued because of your gender.

Myers said the comments she receives about being a woman are few and far between and that she doesn't take them to heart. "Let's face it, if you have to attack someone based on their gender, that's the attacker's problem, not mine," she said.

Wilke surrounds herself with a smaller, more inclusive group of Twitter followers, but has had to close the comments on a blog post due to sexist comments. Lute-Costella has tweeted about "a dude in [her] mentions using multiple tweets to tell [her] why [her] opinion is wrong."

But for some, the harassment can become too much, meaning the easiest course of action is to cut ties with the sport.

"I know plenty of people who have left hockey behind completely, even as fans, because it wasn't worth the trouble," said Zoë Hayden, the founder of the Victory Press, a website dedicated to covering women's sports. "Even casual interaction with the sport and its fan community can be incredibly toxic if you aren't a standard issue straight, white, cis man. Many of these people are great writers and/or great citizens of fandom—astute, critical, passionate. But the pervasive power structure being littered with misogynistic assholes who are protected by their buddies…makes it not even worth getting within a mile of a hockey game for a lot of people."

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Hayden also believes that many white male hockey fans are more uncomfortable confronting their own biases than strictly dealing with a female hockey writer.

"The resistance isn't so much to me, a woman, or people like me, but to the idea that folks might have to actually put in the work to confront their own biases and misconceptions and create a truly inclusive culture in hockey."

Zoë Hayden at the Outdoor Women's Classic. Courtesy Zoë Hayden.

It's easy to see someone like Lute-Costella end up on the radar of a massive, if currently struggling, NHL team and assume that analytics writing is allowing women to gain a bigger voice in the hockey conversation. As cynical as it sounds, the seal of approval of a tough former player like current Leafs' President Brendan Shanahan could change the minds of plenty of beer-swilling guys in the cheap seats.

But we're talking about the NHL, where calling the Sedin twins "sisters" has been a standard insult for a decade and commissioner Gary Bettman insisted that there was nothing sexist about fans chanting "Katie Perry" at Ducks forward Corey Perry. Change isn't going to be that straightforward.

Even the analytics community, which could be perceived as a new domain full of forward thinking, isn't exactly welcoming to everyone.

"While there's an issue with the 'typical sports fan' atmosphere because of the overt sexism—skimpy cheerleader outfits, the assumption you're only watching because of your boyfriend—analytics still has its own gatekeepers," Wilke said.

"For instance, there tends to be an idea that you have to have a strong background in mathematics or statistical modeling to know what you're talking about, and I would venture to guess that most of the women becoming known for hockey analytics don't have that. I certainly don't. I took one stats class in college. Just one. And honestly, I hated it."

And while the situation needs to change, it's not up to female writers to make others accept them. They don't need to prove their credentials to anyone.

"Prove' is a very loaded word," Hayden said. "It's not up to women to crack that 'glass ceiling' and prove anything at all. It's honestly up to the entire culture of analytics to get its shit together and prove that we shouldn't just launch the NHL and the wider analytics community into the sun.

"Folks should be asking their own damn selves if and why they don't treat women in sports journalism and sports analytics the same as men, and ask that same question about any group of people who isn't exactly the same as they are. But that's a tough sell because for a lot of people, there isn't any tangible benefit in doing this—they risk their visibility, their power, potentially their jobs. Which is why progress in these fields is so woefully slow—analytics, women's hockey, sports writing, all of it. There's no tangible benefit, which is sad. You have to convince people that there's something more important out there than their own success and comfort zone."