I’ve chosen to do my blog post on the extreme salary discrepancy between women’s and men’s hockey. While I do not follow women’s hockey closely I became aware of the the wage gap during the PyeongChang Olympics in 2018. In this day and age, it’s absolutely ridiculous for a woman to be playing a sport making a salary of approximately 26,000 a year, while her brother, Phil Kessel, playing that very same sport, is making an average of 8 million.
These women have to pay for their own travel to and from the game, while their male counterparts are catered to. Many of them have outside jobs, they have to, and that limits the time they have to train and perfect their craft.
The fact is, it is extremely difficult to find a lot of information on women’s hockey and their struggles. (It seems like the entire sports community is trying to sweep them under the rug!) The NWHL is always a good place to start searching for women’s hockey. Another place to start searching would be ESPN.com. I’m going to give a bit of warning here though, ESPN doesn’t cover men’s hockey very well. When you get to the website, you have to do a fair bit of searching. That in and of it’s self is beyond ridiculous to me. Lastly, the CBC had a great radio clip with Amanda Kessel regarding players in Canada and the United States refusing to play until the league is bettered.
I don’t think that the media sufficiently covers this matter. As I stated before, it’s difficult to find information on the NWHL, even more-so now that players are refusing to play. One would think that a move of that nature would bring them to the front of the hockey community…apparently not.
