The National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) players are tired of the unfair treatment towards them. They want to have the benefits and same wages as the male players of the NHL. The NWHL was founded in 2015 and started to attract some of the greatest female hockey players from around the world. With the maximum spending budget being only $2.5 million, the players aren’t able to be paid nearly as much as they deserve which eventually led to the boycott starting in May of 2019. There have been multiple teams in NWHL that have chosen to “sit out” of the next season in protest. Even players from the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL), which folded after only 12 seasons in March of 2019, joined the protest. With all of this it becomes apparent that both Canadian and American female hockey players will stand together for equality.
After the folding of the CWHL earlier in the year due to lack of funding, players from both leagues released a new statement in May, joining together with the hashtag #ForTheGame. The players in NWHL want a league that offers its players sufficient resources. A statement from the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association said this, “There is currently not a league that consistently showcases the best product of women’s hockey in the world, pays its players a living wage, and has the infrastructure to set the game up to succeed. Such a league would represent an important step in closing the dream gap between young boys and girls.”
One major inequality was the pay. Surviving off of professional hockey alone in North America is hard. The league tweeted that some of the league veterans and the top skilled players signed contracts for $15,000 in 2019, paying them for games, practices and possibly a few playoff games. The salary caps for the teams which carry between 20 and 22 players is only $100,000-$150,000 whereas the lowest paying NHL team’s payroll is $260,515,726. Boston Pride player Jillian Dempsey who is the first NWHL player to reach 100 points and was also named an All-Star in 2019, has a full-time teaching job. Emma Ruggerio, who plays for Buffalo works as a waitress at IHOP. Dempsey said this about the pay difference in an interview for The Athletic, “Having a league in which you can play competitively is something we’re all so grateful for. Of course, you want to see many things improve. It’s hard to be patient sometimes, You see what our male counterparts have, and it’s like, ‘Oh, if only we were getting that $800,000 as a rookie.’ You see what the male players make, even at the lower end of the money in male pro sports. It’s crazy. Like basketball. What do they even do with that? Of course, we see that and we want that.” This shows that even the newest players in the NHL still get paid more than players in the NWHL even if the female players have played for years.
When the NWHL was invited to the NHL’s 2019 All-Star event, the women received great responses from the crowd. It would be interesting to see if the NWHL was included in more of the NHL’s events if they would get more recognition. This may lead to more fans which will eventually lead to more money for the league. Another possibility is for the NHL to financially assist the NWHL in a similar way to how the NBA subsidizes the WNBA.
As a young female and an avid hockey fan, I would like to see the women in hockey get the same recognition and compensation as men who play the same sport. I admire the women of the NWHL for taking this stand even if it means not playing the game that they love professionally. I hope that their sacrifice will lead to improvements in their treatment and will bring them back on the ice where they belong.
