No Women for the Hall. Again. Tuesday's Hockey Hall of Fame election in Toronto sent four very worthy former players to the induction ceremonies next November: Joe Sakic, Mats Sundin, Adam Oates and Pavel Bure. But while fans can rightly argue over whether the 18-member selection committee erred by not voting in other players (Brendan Shanahan, Eric Lindros, Jeremy Roenick, Claude Lemieux or Mike Richter, to name a few) or builders (Pat Burns, Fred Shero), the committee certainly made one vast oversight. No women were elected, for the second straight year. Yes, the pool of eligible players is tiny in women's hockey relative to the men's game, and its history is relatively short. The first women to be inducted, Angela James of Canada and Cammi Granato of the United States, entered the Hall only in 2010. But for no women to be added since then is surprising. The International Ice Hockey Hall of Fame inducted James and Granato, along with Geraldine Heaney of Team USA, in 2008. Since then it has elected Riikka Nieminen (Finland) in 2010 and Karyn Bye (United States) in 2011. There are other worthy female candidates, as we shall see in a moment. But why were no women voted into the Hall in Toronto the last two years? Perhaps because there are no women among the 18 voters on the selection committee. As Bill Hay, chairman of the Hockey Hall of Fame, pointed out during Tuesday's announcement, the makeup of the selection committee is carefully balanced: there are six former players, six managers and six hockey journalists. Roughly half are themselves already members of the Hall. There is no doubt that the selectors are a distinguished and learned group (full disclosure: I know some of them and unreservedly vouch for their integrity), but there is one inescapable fact about them - they are all men. The voters are Jim Gregory and Pat Quinn, who are the committee co-chairmen, and Scotty Bowman, David Branch, Brian Burke, Colin Campbell, John Davidson, Eric Duhatschek, Mike Emrick, Michael Farber, Marc de Foy, Mike Gartner, Anders Hedberg, Igor Larionov, Lanny McDonald, Serge Savard, Peter Stastny and Bill Torrey. (To earn election, a candidate must get 14 of the 18 votes. Voters can cast a ballot for no more than four players.) No matter how well-meaning the voters are about recognizing the women's game, the absence of a female voice among them almost certainly leads to the absence of an advocate when it comes time to speak up in favor of a woman inductee - or even to point out that there are no women inductees. And there are notable women out there, beyond Heaney, Nieminen and Bye. As the hockey historian Joe Pelletier has written, there are quite a few women worthy of consideration: the recent Olympians Cassie Campbell and Danielle Goyette; the pioneering 1930s player Hilda Ranscombe; the crusading preteenager Abby Hoffman, whose 1956 court challenge made it illegal to bar girls from boys" teams in Canada and who went on to compete in four Olympics in track and preside over Canada's federal sports agency; and many more. The current selection committee is not to blame for not electing a woman to the class of 2012, but perhaps in 2013 its members might be more conscious of the glaring absence of females in the Hall. And when it comes time to fill a vacancy or two on the committee, it would probably behoove the Hall to add women who have played or written about hockey - women's hockey - to the mix.