Cultural differences

I spent several weeks this summer playing women's shinny, which is unusual for me. It just worked out that, in the past, I've always played shinny with men. What I noticed is that there are some cultural differences.

1. Chit-chat: The women spend a lot of time during the warm-up, chatting. This seemed odd to me because even though I'm female, I dislike chit-chat. The men basically warm up until there are enough people in each colour of jersey out on the ice, then upon some subtle-but-unspoken signal, they all line up for a face-off. I actually was getting frustrated with the amount of time lost at the beginning. So I tried getting people lined up for a face-off, in the hopes the other players would notice and co-operate, but it didn't work. It was like herding cats. The women WANT to talk, discuss, strategize, while the men actively avoid it. 
2. Choosing sides: There is a lot of soul-searching going on with the women. Some want to be on the same team as their friends, and won't switch sides. (I personally don't care and took to bringing out two jerseys, just in case.) Eventually someone would ask people to switch sides if the sides were uneven, and this is before the opening face-off! The guys, on the other hand, are very unstructured about it and never discuss anything - it all just happens. Everyone does a bit of a head count; if someone has another jersey, they'll just change sides if necessary; there is an unspoken rule to make the teams even so that the weakest players generally make sure they are on opposite sides. It all happens a lot quicker so you get more ice time actually playing, and less pointless skating around.
3. Face-offs: The women use the "hockey-one-hockey-two-hockey-three" face-off system like when we were little kids. The men have a few different ways of doing it, depending on which group: either one of the wingers knocks the puck toward the two centres, raising it a little, kind of like an actual face-off, or one team just arbitrarily starts with the puck, and the other teams gives them up to centre ice, before the game gets going. The mens' method is definitely less time-consuming.
4. Apologies: In shinny, it seems that women are expected to apologize to each other when making an aggressive move that (say) accidentally knocks someone over. Otherwise "the other girl will think I'm a b*$#@". Men don't bother with apologies, and don't care either way. They know it's a game, and that sometimes it gets a bit rough, but they don't take anything personally. (Unless it's one of the 10% - because even the men have limits - but they have different ways of ensuring an acceptable group dynamic.)

I realize these are gross generalizations based on stereotypes, but what I found interesting was that, in a group, the stereotypes really become obvious, almost like caricatures. And since I was so used to playing with the men, the contrast was quite noticeable. 

The bottom line is that the men get more actual shinny time, because they use less time on other aspects of organizing and socializing. But maybe the women are there precisely for the socializing as well as the ice time. I don't know. I prefer the hockey, myself, but I certainly did notice the cultural differences.