In the words of hockey-scholar and historian Carly Adams, “exclusion from halls of fame is just one way women’s accomplishments are overlooked..."

There's perhaps no better, or worse, example than the Hockey Hall of Fame, an organization that continues to exclude qualified women, refusing to not only recognize more than a century of women who built and excelled in the sport, but not even utilizing the two available spots, while ensuring men fill the Hall annually.

In the 16 years women have been eligible for induction to the Hall of Fame, only 15 players, of an available 32 spots, were used by the Hockey Hall of Fame. Alongside those 15 players, is only one builder, Montreal Victoire general manager Daniele Sauvageau who was inducted in 2025.

But the list of qualified women is long.

It's a societal issue across Halls of Fame. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has received similar critique, as the "Hall’s canon-making doesn’t just reek of sexist gatekeeping, but also purposeful ignorance and hostility."

The history of women's hockey has been well documented. Sadly, it simply hasn't been valued as real or legitimate by organizations like the NHL, IIHF, or the Hockey Hall of Fame. Instead, "purposeful ignorance" has kept women from a Hall of Fame that does not represent the sport as a whole, only giving full recognition to men.

2024 saw the first time in 14 years that two women, using both eligible positions by the Hall of Fame, a discriminatory limitation in itself when four men are eligible to be inducted each year, compared to only two women, no matter how many qualified women there are. Sadly, the Hockey Hall of Fame doesn't even believe there are two women, in more than 130 years of storied history, worthy of joining the 300 men in the Hall.

There is no woman more qualified to be inducted than builder Fran Rider. In fact, Rider's influence far exceeds those of most men in the Hall of Fame. Her multi-layered building efforts have spanned from the grassroots level as the longtime president of the largest women's hockey organization, the OWHA, in the world. She was also the driving force that got women's hockey to the World Championships and Olympics, nearly single-handedly driving those efforts and insuring national teams from across the globe could come together to play, and inspire future generations. She remains active in building and planning for the game as one of the most influential figures in the game.

But she's not alone historically, including women such as Isobel Stanley and Lady Byng, Marguerite Norris, Myrtle Cook, Bobbie Rosenfeld, and Alexandrine Gibb. All played historic and paramount roles for women and girls in hockey.

But the Hockey Hall of Fame has ignored them. 

On the ice, Cindy Curley becomes the oldest woman ever inducted to the Hockey Hall of Fame as a player. But her career predominantly took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Women had been playing competitively for a century before this. For an organization aimed at preserving the history of hockey, the Hockey Hall of Fame has put on a masterclass of erasing women.

Athletes like Hilda Ranscombe, Bobbie Rosenfeld, Simone Cauchon, Eleanor Tufford, Jacqueline Mautin, Eva Ault, Helen Schmuck and dozens more belong. 

Some of the qualified women currently excluded from the Hall of Fame from more recent seaons include Julie Chu, Meghan Duggan, Shannon Szabados, Noora Räty, Amanda Kessel, Rebecca Johnston, Cassie Campbell-Pascall, Maria Rooth, Vicky Sunohara, Florence Schelling, Cathy Phillips, Dawn McGuire, and Kim Martin Hasson. Some of these women are already in the IIHF Hall of Fame, others in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, or US Hockey Hall of Fame.

But not the Hockey Hall of Fame, an organization that continues to be dominated by men.

It's not simply passive exclusion, the Hockey Hall of Fame walls are filled with men who have belittled women. Many men in the Hockey Hall of Fame have been arrested for or accused of domestic violence and sexual assault against women. That list includes Bobby Hull, Doug Gilmour, Denis Potvin, Dino Ciccarelli, Scott Stevens, Mario Lemieux, Sergei Zubov, Ed Belfour, and Patrick Roy.

Others, like Walter Brown, former owner of the Boston Bruins and president of the IIHF didn't think much of women in hockey. Brown, who operated the Boston Garden, refused to bring women's hockey games to the Garden when the sport was beginning to have a rebirth in the 1930s. 

“Walter Brown . . . does not think much of girls’ hockey . . . We asked him if he thought of booking a couple of Canadian teams for his ice. He exploded, ‘Women’s hockey! I should say not. They wouldn’t draw,'" wrote Myrtle Cook in her column at the time. 

This year, women sold our TD Garden in Boston drawing 17,850 fans.

It goes further than historic comments however.

In 1984, the Hockey Hall of Fame created the Elmer Ferguson Award, awarded annually to a hockey journalist, as awarded by the Professional Hockey Writers' Association. To date, only a single woman, Helene Elliott in 2005, has been a recipient. But Ferguson, a long-time editor with The Montreal Star himself, historically believed women did not belong in sports like hockey.

In the August 1938 edition of Maclean’s, Ferguson penned an article titled “I Don’t Like Amazon Athletes.”

In the article Ferguson wrote that women were welcomed in sport, as long as it was “a girl whose physical perfection was enhanced by a clinging one-piece bathing suit,” or a woman “of sheer glittering glory, of golden hair that blazes beneath the dazzle of the lights, of white skirt and trunks and shoes, and tightfitting bodice.”

What Ferguson didn't want to see, was women in “those violent, face-straining, face-dirtying, body-bouncing, sweaty, graceless, stumbling, struggling, wrenching, racking, jarring and floundering sports.” Ferguson called women’s hockey “a spectacle” that “reaches the lower levels of competitive athletic entertainment after you’ve watched the grace and speed and certainty and skill with which males perform.”

“In all truth, the girls in hockey skate in such rickety fashion, bobble along so uncertainly, that a good strong breeze will pretty nearly blow them off their stumbling feet, and body-checks are just so much wasted effort,” he wrote.

And he claimed that no man would want a woman who wore “that peculiarly bewildered and distressed look which girl athletes under strain always possess, that strain which so ill becomes them.”

That included watching women “struggling weakly and gracelessly around armed with hockey sticks . . . "

He described women in hockey as “big, masculine, flat-chested, leather-limbed and horselike-looking stars of the game."

On the ice, those women, have been disregarded and disrespected by members of the hockey world, including the Hockey Hall of Fame for decades.

There’s perhaps no more visual representation of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s exclusion and gatekeeping of women in hockey than the relegation of the PWHL’s Walter Cup to a secondary location.

The Hockey Hall of Fame boasts of the history on display in the Great Hall, home to not only a placard for each Hall of Fame inductee, but to the NHL's Stanley Cup, but also the NHL's individual award trophies. The Great Hall is the showcase moment for all men's hockey fans who visit the Hockey Hall of Fame. The Hockey Hall of Fame calls is "the cathedral to the icons of hockey." It's also the room where Elmer Ferguson's name and Memorial Award winners reside.

For women's hockey fans, the Great Hall is another reminder that the Hall doesn't view women's hockey on the same level as men's hockey. At the Hockey Hall of Fame, men's hockey is the standard, while women's hockey is a footnote. 

The Walter Cup is located in the "Women's Hockey – Celebrating Excellence" exhibit. It's within this exhibit where artifacts from women who should be inducted as honored members, like Hilda Ranscombe, Bev Beaver, Julie Chu, Kim Martin, Manon Rhéaume, and Noora Räty reside. It's a far cry from the Hall of Fame's heart, the Great Hall.

From the Walter Cup, to the Hall of Fame's gatekeeping and exclusion of women, it's another year of the Hockey Hall of Fame placing women in the game as an afterthought, and actively erasing, rather than preserving, the rich history of women's hockey, and women in hockey.

With the launch of the PWHL, perhaps someday soon women's hockey will launch a Hall of Fame of their own leaving the Men's Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto to celebrate, support, and preserve the only hockey history they've truly embraced, that of the NHL and men.