By Scott Burnside (The Athletic)

Lindsay Artkin peered into a crowd featuring some of the brightest minds in the hockey world.

It was NHL Draft Weekend 2019 and the president of the National Hockey League Coaches’ Association (NHLCA) was about to deliver her opening remarks to some 500 coaches at the annual symposium.

By one metric, the event was already a huge success. Interest in the Global Coaches’ Clinic had been so great that organizers moved the gathering out of the NHL’s hotel headquarters and into a bigger venue in the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre.

Still, something was missing. There were maybe a handful of women in attendance, Artkin estimated, as she looked over the audience. Four? Maybe five?

“I said, ‘we need to change that,’” she recalled in a recent interview.

A lack of women in high-profile leadership positions is an issue organizations face across all professional sports.

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