A boys’ club no more: Canadian women are making inroads into the most male-dominated industries
When Dawn Braid’s father recruited her to be a skating instructor with the Junior B team he owned in suburban Toronto, she was uncertain. “I remember saying to him, ‘There is no way they’re going to listen to me.’” But that was a lifetime ago.
Last year, the Arizona Coyotes added her to the team’s coaching staff, making her the first full-time female coach in theNHL.
A half-century after the women’s liberation movement sparked calls for gender equality, women’s participation in traditionally male-dominated fields – from banking and medicine to science and engineering – has grown dramatically. Yet challenges remain. Women, on average, still earn less than men in similar roles. Some women continue to endure sexual harassment in the workplace, sparking the recent #MeToo movement. And some bastions of male exclusivity remain. But that, too, is changing.
In the world of professional poker, for instance, women like Canadians Kara Scott and Xuan Li have recently made profitable inroads. And in virtual gaming – the stereotypical domain of controller-obsessed adolescent males – women are becoming a force to be reckoned with.
Consider Jade Raymond, who set her sights on a career in the industry soon after graduating from McGill University with a degree in computer science in 1998.
When Ubisoft, a video game company, made her a producer on Assassin’s Creed in 2007, it drew howls of protest from many young men, gaming’s traditional demographic, but they were silenced when the game became a hit. Raymond went on to be executive producer of five more games for the company, and two years ago joined Electronic Arts to form its new subsidiary, Motive Studios.
Raymond has led the way for others. Despite resistance to female participation, the number of women video game developers is growing. In fact, it doubled from 11 to more than 21 per cent between 2009 and 2015, according to the International Game Developers Association.
In professional sports, too, a handful of women are breaking down gender barriers. In 2015, the NFL signed its first full-time female official and two teams, the Buffalo Bills and Arizona Cardinals, soon added women to their coaching staffs. In the NBA, the San Antonio Spurs and the Sacramento Kings both have female assistant coaches.
Other women are carving out a name for themselves in professional hockey. Braid, a native of Woodbridge, Ont., traces her rise through the hockey ranks back to the mid-80s. She had competed in three national figure skating championships when her father purchased the Vaughan Raiders and brought her on as a skating instructor. Braid has been working with hockey players ever since. The Toronto Maple Leafs hired her to run their skating program at a development camp in 2005, and she went on to work with several other NHL franchises, including the Buffalo Sabres and the Anaheim Ducks. Over the years, she has also worked with several high-profile players individually, including Jason Spezza, Mike Cammalleri and John Tavares.
“Though there are some men who are skeptical today, there is waymore respect for me now,” says Braid. “Most of the players just look at me as another coach.”
Sami Jo Small is another woman who had distinguished herself on ice. Growing up in Winnipeg, she played in a boy’s league for years and then became the first female to compete in the Manitoba Major Junior Hockey League. At California’s Stanford University, where she studied mechanical engineering, she laced up for the men’s hockey squad as a goalie – and was named the conference’s Most Valuable Player. Small was added to the roster of the women’s team that competed at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, the first Games to include women’s ice hockey, and represented Canada in the next two Winter Games.
“At one point during the Games in Nagano, I ended up in an athletes’ lounge watching television with Wayne Gretzky. We had both played in California so we talked a little about that experience,” she says. “It was surreal. I had grown up with posters of him on my wall.”
Her meeting with The Great One notwithstanding, Small recalls that by and large NHL players didn’t know much about the women’s game overall. But that changed, as the team garnered more attention and individual players, including Hayley Wickenheiser, shared some ice time with men. Today, some of the best male and female players have been teammates. For example, NHL star Carey Price shared goaltending duties with the national team’s Shannon Szabados when they both played in the Western Hockey League.
Small, who helped lead Canada to five world titles, made perhaps her biggest contribution to hockey when she helped establish the first women’s professional hockey circuit 10 years ago, the Canadian-Women’s Hockey League.
“When I was a kid it was unacceptable for girls to play hockey and there were barely any teams for us,” she says. “But now you see little girls playing hockey everywhere. Women’s hockey has become part of the fabric of society.”
Says Braid: “If women learn from my experience and see that they can go out there and achieve whatever they want, wherever they want, that’s great. It’s important.”