Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
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I sat on the couch on Jan. 1, 2024, with tears streaming down my face. I was watching the first ever pregame show of the Professional Women’s Hockey League. Tennis legend Billie-Jean King was on screen, talking about how last year American hockey phenom Kendall Coyne asked her to help build a sustainable women’s professional hockey league. Fast forward a few months and a heavy investment from an American billionaire and here we were, about to watch two women’s teams play in front of a sold-out crowd at Toronto’s former Maple Leaf Gardens.
My 15-year-old Gen Z daughter looked at me, perplexed by my tears: “You’re not even that into hockey.” (Somehow the hours I’ve spent driving her to and from practice, watching her games and volunteering do not count.) But it isn’t about the hockey. It’s about so much more.
I grew up in Toronto and went to one of the city’s elite girls-only private schools. I graduated high school in 1990 and for most of the 80s had been fed a steady diet of “Girls can do anything!” You can be a doctor or lawyer! Sit in the C-suites! My possibilities were endless.
Spending four years at the University of Toronto did little to tarnish my girls-can-do-anything view of the world, protected by the bubble of the undergrad experience. Then I went to law school.
The first inkling I had that perhaps girls-can’t-do-everything was during my first year when a generous law school alumnus volunteered his busy Bay Street time to have me shadow him for the day. Spending time at his firm’s office, I couldn’t help but notice how few women were around, let alone in leadership positions. Hmm, I thought, maybe Bay Street is not for me.
That visit wasn’t the only reason why but I found my way to practising law at a government agency early in my career, where almost all my colleagues were women, most having moved from more traditional big firms so they could be lawyers but also have kids and a family life. Since the 90s law schools have been graduating more than 50 per cent women each year, yet a survey of how many of those women stay in traditional law shows they simply don’t. It is still male dominated and woefully white.
In the legal profession, sexism hit me hard. While my colleagues and I were mostly women, the lawyers and judges we interacted with were not. I can’t tell you the number of times I came home angry and defeated, having been spoken down to or dismissed because I was a woman. My racialized colleagues had it even worse, being mistaken for the interpreter or client when they were at court to prosecute the case. Even in the small corner of my female-dominated world, I was passed over for the only director position in favour of the sole man in the department. That day in 2017 is memorialized in my Facebook memories by a Jon Stewart meme: “Does sexism still exist? 99 per cent of men say no.”
For years women who play hockey have struggled to receive the respect they deserve. They have formed professional leagues that have failed owing to lack of funding, have not been paid and have had to fundraise for ice time. Men have said no one will watch.
The PWHL has proved them wrong. Record numbers attended the inaugural games with more than 13,000 showing up at Minnesota’s first match. And Toronto faced off against Montreal on Feb. 16 at the Scotiabank Arena to a sold-out crowd of 19,285. Guess what, people want to watch women play! The stands are filled with girls who were ecstatic to watch their Olympic idols and other women on the ice. Representation matters.
For the first time my daughter and her teammates can dream beyond university-level hockey. A look into the personal lives of these players is also amazing. Unlike their male counterparts, they are almost all university educated and have played hockey at that level – and many have partners and children. Natalie Spooner is back from maternity leave, Brianne Jenner is a mom of three and Marie-Philip Poulin was on the ice with her teammate and fiancée, Laura Stacey.
This was the reason for my tears. As I sat, Gen X mom with her Gen Z child, watching women broadcasters talk about women playing, it hit me. It wasn’t just about hockey. It was and is bigger than that. I looked at my daughter and thought maybe, just maybe, girls could do anything?
Laura Shaw lives in Oakville, Ont.