“I love my job, and I love what I was doing, but it was very difficult this year,” she said. “It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t showing up to the rink and feeling like I was working in a candy store, like it usually would when I cover hockey.

“There was a lot of, more than anything, mental gymnastics to go through. There was a lot of criticism — not just within the social media audience, but also within the brethren of hockey — that I was not used to facing. And a lot of it seemed to stem from my gender.”...

“There’s a culture that believes when a woman is hired in a high-profile, visible, important role in the game, that she has been hired because of her gender, or to check a box,” she said. “This then upsets members of our audience, because they don’t feel it’s fair. They dislike it, and that breeds contempt for women in these roles.

“Whereas when men are hired, you don’t see a statement, ‘It’s because he’s a man,’ because men have always held these roles, traditionally.”

-Leah Hextall of ESPN. Sean Fitz-Gerald of The Athletic ($) has much more.

added 2:41pm, Below is a video link to Hextall's recent presentation.