The International Ice Hockey Federation claims the organization “encourages its members to promote the game of ice hockey to women and girls.” Unfortunately, the IIHF itself has subjugated women in hockey for years.
The organization continues to take a paternalistic, controlling approach to women’s hockey and ignores opportunities for growth in the women’s game. The lack of equity between men’s and women’s hockey is almost unrivalled in sports.
From singularly gender-marking women’s competitions, to placing restrictive competitive tiers on women’s competitions, and providing inequitable offerings for competitions themselves, the IIHF is actively holding the growth of women’s hockey back.
The IIHF has maintained a two-tier system at World Championship levels, placing women’s teams into two groups, Group A and Group B, at the senior World Championship, and U-18 World Championship levels with all top teams placed in Group A. This separation is unique to women’s hockey under the false pretence of a lack of parity and restricts developing nations from testing themselves, or advancing to new levels of competition internationally. At the recent women’s U-18 World Championship, 14.3% of games were decided by a seven-goal or wider margin, but at the men’s U-20 World Junior Championship, that gap grew to 23.3% of games being decided by seven or more goals. So why is only the women’s game tiered for parity?
In men’s hockey, there is a Group A and Group B distinction, but the groups are based on an even division of talent, allowing lower-ranked nations to compete against top countries in the round-robin portion of the event.
While IIHF competition on the men’s side includes the senior, U-20, and U-18 World Championships, women only have a senior and U-18 World Championship. The complete absence of a major international competition is unfathomable for an organization that itself acknowledged that “women’s hockey is not just an important long-term investment. It’s also an untapped market that is well-positioned to pay off.”
World governing bodies including FIFA (soccer) and FIBA (basketball) feature identical competitions for men and women - senior, U-19, and U-17 - placing hockey as a unique entity in its erasure of women.
Similarly, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the IIHF primarily cancelled women’s tournaments, while organizers found ways to keep men’s competitions alive. This included the cancellation of the women’s U-18 World Championship, while the men’s U-20 World Juniors were supported, and run by the IIHF in 2021-2022.
“This is not a gender issue, this is a COVID-19 issue,” IIHF president Luc Tardif claimed in 2021.
“Is there an economic incentive to host the men’s World Championship and World Juniors every year no matter what? Absolutely,” Tardif continued. “But people misunderstand that this is because we favour men’s hockey over women’s, which is completely false. The revenue generated from these two events enables our federation to survive and support the operation of all other IIHF World Championship events. So if I have to make every effort to host a specific tournament to ensure the survival of other events, then it is my responsibility as IIHF President to do this.”
It’s a similar argument used by NCAA programs looking to circumvent Title IX legislation for “revenue generating” programs.
Tardif continued his defence by touting the IIHF’s hosting of a women’s World Championship since 1990 as evidence the IIHF’s “commitment to women’s hockey is longstanding, legitimate, and substantial.”
Tardif ignores that the IIHF was founded in 1908, and had been supporting men’s hockey for 82 years prior to hosting a women’s event. The first men’s World Championship was held in 1920, 70 years prior to a women’s event.
In 1987, the IIHF refused to sanction a women’s World Championship planned to take place in Canada; instead, the tournament ran as the unofficial World Hockey Tournament, an event featuring legendary women’s hockey players including Angela James, Geraldine Heaney, Cathy Philips, Cindy Curley, Dawn McGuire, Marian Coveny, Shirley Cameron, and many others.
Only after this tournament, organized and run by women, saw a positive reception, did men step in and claim the success of the first official tournament in 1990. At this first sanctioned event, games were often played at early times limiting fan access, as the tournament, hosted in Ottawa, Canada, was forced to take secondary ice times in favour of the Ottawa 67s, a junior men’s hockey team in the OHL, who took primary scheduling for their playoff series and practices. When evaluating the success of this first tournament at a meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, IIHf members were shown video of the tournament to see if women’s hockey could someday become an Olympic sport. “[T]he reaction of IIHF members was that “women can’t skate that fast and shoot that hard,” accusing (Canadian) officials of having artificially accelerated the speed of the game footage.”
Even following 1990, the IIHF did not consecutively offer a women’s tournament until the year after women were allowed to compete in the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Prior to this, tournaments were only held in 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1997. Men had been competing annually in an IIHF-sanctioned World Championship since 1920.
It took until 2022 for the IIHF to host a women’s World Championship in an Olympic year. Prior to that, only men’s World Championship tournaments were held in Olympic years.
While the actual number of tournaments differs for men and women, the number of teams and participants also varies. In men’s competitions, rosters can include up to 25 players, while women’s rosters in IIHF competitions are limited to 23 players, impacting access of elite women to international competition.
Similarly, in the men’s IIHF World Championship, 16 teams are involved at the top tier, while in the women’s IIHF World Championship, only 10 teams compete.
As researchers state, “paternalism is based on the Latin word pater (“father”) and the patriarchal cultures in which the father is the head of the family, an authority figure responsible for the welfare of family members and other subordinates and dependents.”
This can also be explained as “attitudes of overprotection that are commonly understood as an infringement of the personal freedom and autonomy of a person (or class of persons) with a beneficent or protective intent.” In the case of hockey, this presents in men controlling the bodies and competitive structure of women.
When you look at the IIHF’s rule book, this version of unequal protection toward women while allowing men freedom of choice is evident, specifically as it pertains to facial protection.
In terms of face protection, women at all levels of competition are required to “wear a full-face protection (full-visor, or cage facial protection).” The rule is an infantilization of women, likening them to men’s U-18 or minor players, who are the only competitors in men’s competitions required to wear full facial protection.
In other levels of hockey, such as within Hockey Canada, these biased rules extend to other portions of equipment including neck guards. Hockey Canada likens women’s hockey to minor hockey for boys in their rule which states “The wearing of a BNQ-certified throat protector is required for players registered in minor and female hockey.” The same goes for goaltenders where Hockey Canada’s rules state, “goaltenders in minor or female hockey who wear an attachment to the mask or helmet designed to protect the throat, must still wear a BNQ-certified throat protector.”
As scholar Taylor McKee wrote, “This is a blatantly infantilizing policy that equates women with children.”
Perhaps the most obvious way in which the IIHF continues to diminish women is through the visual and open gender marking of events.
Gender marking is the “verbal and visual presentation of male athletes and men’s sport as being the norm, while rendering female athletes and women’s competitions secondary status.”
This is seen through the “World Championship” name for the men’s competition, while a clear delineation is made marking the “Women’s World Championship.” If it were symmetrical, (ie. Men’s World Championship and Women’s World Championship), the issue would be resolved, but the current standard of IIHF practice is asymmetrical (ie. World Championship and Women’s World Championship).
As Halbert and Latimer wrote, “By consistently defining women's athletic events as "women's" athletic events while men's athletic events are defined as athletic events, women are marked as "other" and men as the norm, the standard, the universal.”
Or as historian Susan Cahn explained in her book Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-century Women's Sport, “The primary status of male sport found expression in common language, too. Women’s presence was signaled with references to “women’s basketball” or the “ladies golf tour,” while the unmodified “basketball” or “golf” presumed the presence of men. Similarly, by itself the supposedly neutral noun “athlete” was in common usage a male term. Female athleticism found acknowledgment only through the modified term “woman athlete.” In language as well as practice, women’s sport required modification.”
Bodychecking was not only “allowed,” but promoted and a major portion of women’s hockey until the 1992 World Championships. At this point, the IIHF outlawed bodychecking, a rule change which spread across the globe, creating widespread change, particularly in Canada where bodychecking remained legal.
At the 1990 tournament, where bodychecking was, according to rule books, legal, the IIHF confused participants by telling media and the world that bodychecking was legal, while quietly telling officials it was banned fearing the critique of physical women. Gunther Sabetzki, president of the IIHF, “did not want to risk the IIHF being criticized for staging a less than legitimate first women’s world championship by not allowing the longstanding artifact of body-checking. He also did not want to risk IIHF endorsement of a separate women’s hockey routine performed based on an official body-contact artifact, without first having some evaluation of its acceptability to members of the media and the public. His strategy was to publicly state body-checking was the artifact of the 1990 WWHC tournament, then privately instruct the actors, coaches, and arbiters the tournament was to be played in accordance with the intent of a less violent body contact regulation.”
As scholars have found, the absence of body checking immediately made women in hockey feel as though they were playing a secondary, lesser version of the sport, “The players view the limitation of body checking as an obstacle from being regarded as the real sport. They feel that they are real ice hockey players…they are made for ice hockey just as men, and they are not frail and weak women. They do not feel any need to adjust any rules or the physical training regimen simply because they are women. “The same muscles are used” and body checking should be allowed.”
Nancy Therberge, one of the preeminent scholars researching how gender norms are produced in hockey wrote, “as aggressive body contact, a trademark of masculinity, would not be used in the female version of the game, male ice hockey would not risk losing its trademark as a sport for real men.”
Regardless of whether current participants in women’s hockey want to see body checking return or not, the original reason for removing it from IIHF competition was steeped in the sexist notion of upholding traditional feminine and masculine norms.
In Conclusion
Overall, the IIHF, through a movement away from equality, has also removed equity in hockey and continues to cement the game as a man’s domain, while naming and enacting rules to place hockey, as played by women, as a separate, unique, and lesser iteration.
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