NHL, Its Workforce 84% White, Sets Baseline to Up Diversity

The NHL for the first time has done an internal demographic study of its staff and all 32 teams, and the results show that hockey has a lot of work to do to increase diversity at all levels.

The report released Tuesday found that 83.6% of the NHL’s workforce is white and that men make up nearly 62% of the total, based on the 4,200 people who participated in a voluntary and anonymous survey (about 67% of all employees).

That nearly mirrors the situation on the ice, where more than 90% of players and nearly all coaches and officials are white.

“The whole purpose behind doing a workforce study is to provide a baseline: a fact-based baseline so that you can begin to develop very intentional and specific strategies around where you need to hire, how you need to hire, how you need to improve your brand,” said Kim Davis, the NHL’s executive vice president of social impact, growth and legislative affairs. “This is a good start, but there’s a ways to go.”

One of the next steps is turning the data into a race and gender report card produced by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, which has for years graded sports leagues on hiring practices.

In the 24-page report, which was presented to the league’s Board of Governors and distributed to multiple internal committees, Commissioner Gary Bettman said the data will shape policies “that will produce the greatest impacts in the years to come.”

The results are not surprising for a sport that for many reasons, from socioeconomic to geographic and more, has remained predominantly white. While the NHL has made efforts to bolster diversity efforts from youth hockey to the front office, change has been slow.

Davis said it is not as simple as recruiting people of color to work for the NHL, that it starts with improving how underrepresented communities see and feel about the sport itself. The NHL, eager to diversify its fan base, mapped out seven courses of action, from education and community initiatives to marketing and partnerships.

“A number of those steps are already in progress,” Davis said. “You can’t expect to recruit (Black, Indigenous and people of color) folks to work in the league if you don’t at the same time have your stadium fan code of conduct underway so people feel like the sport is really serious about growing the fan base. You also have to make sure that you are reaching out to the communities from a youth participation perspective, so all of those efforts are underway.”

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