The casino industry is still struggling to close the gender pay gap, yet progress has been made, with companies reporting gradual decreases of pay disparity, and the prognosis is optimistic.
One of the best ways to close the gender pay gap is to employ more women in senior positions in the industry who can contribute to creating a wholly equal workplace. Luckily, the casino industry is waking up to this fact, and UK online casinos specifically have made significant progress in hiring women in high positions of power.
Today’s article will introduce you to some of the female trailblazers who are revolutionising the casino industry and their accomplishments.
We will start our article by discussing the impressive women who worked hard to be noticed in the male-dominated casino industry and now sit in the highest positions of their respective companies.
No article about women in gambling can be written without mentioning Denise Coates.
Coates is a British-born businesswoman and the daughter of Peter Coates, the former chairman of Stoke City FC. After graduating with a degree in econometrics, she along with her father and brothers founded Bet365 in 2000, one of the most successful online sportsbooks in the world.
Coates applied her knowledge of statistics in the creation of the sports betting site, contributing immensely to the sportsbook’s revolutionary betting algorithm.
Denise Coates owns about half of Bet365, which, according to latest estimates, is worth $9 billion, making her fortune close to $4.5 billion. Denise is still very much involved in the business, acting as a joint CEO with her brother John.
Amy Howe is a New Yorker who has held multiple senior positions across various industries. Howe has a degree in Business, Management, Marketing and Support Services from Cornell University which led to her finding a seat at the table at some of the biggest companies in the world.
Howe first became a partner at McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm, and then went on to become the CSO of Live Nation, and the COO of Ticketmaster. Most recently, in 2021, Amy Howe was made the CEO of FanDuel, a massive online gambling operator offering casino games, sports betting and daily fantasy sports.
Danish-born Jette Nygaard-Andersen is one of the women with the most experience in the casino industry who successfully climbed the ladder to end up being the CEO of one of the most prestigious multinational casino companies in the world.
Nygaard-Andersen received an economics degree from the University of Copenhagen which she used to gain access to the big Swedish media company Modern Times Group. She spent 16 years working for Modern Times Group, during which time she’s held numerous senior positions.
Nygaard-Andersen later chaired Astralis, a Danish e-sports organisation which became the first esports company to conduct an initial public offering. E-sports have long been a male-dominated field which made Nygaard-Andersen’s appointment all the more impressive.
Later, she became the non-executive director of the gambling giant Entain and reached the CEO role in 2021, making her the first woman to become a CEO of a UK-listed betting company.
Operating a successful land-based or online casino business is only a facet of the female contributions in the field of gambling. Some of the first women to break the glass ceiling of the casino industry were ones who made their names on the gambling table.
This section of the article will introduce you to a few famous female gamblers with impressive win streaks and big monetary gains from professional gambling tournaments.
Annette Oberstad is a professional poker player from Norway who has set numerous records over her illustrious career. Oberstad started playing poker at 15 and soon started making headlines.
It was not just beginner’s luck, however, as Annette proved four years later. A day shy of her 19th birthday, Oberstad won the first edition of the World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE) Main Event on 17th September 2007.
By winning the Main Event, which carried a prize of $2.01 million, Oberstad set two records – becoming the youngest WSOPE winner (a record she still holds today) and becoming the first woman to win that amount of money in a single event.
Annette Oberstad continues to play poker, taking part in online and in-person events around the world. She is estimated to have won about $3.9 million from poker tournaments so far.
Annie Duke is a household name in the poker world, a player who has amassed millions in poker earnings.
Duke holds a World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelet and she used to hold the record of highest poker earnings in the history of the World Series of Poker with $1,166,567 from 39 cashes at WSOP events. Her total poker earnings total $4,270,548.
Annie Duke’s brother Howard Lederer is also a famous poker player who has two WSOP bracelets and holds two World Poker Tour titles.
Katy Lederer is Annie’s and Howard’s younger sister who also aspired to play poker like her impressive siblings. However, she gave up that dream in her feat to becoming a writer. Katy became famous for authoring the book Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (2003) which detailed her and her siblings’ experience in professional poker.
Any girl who wants to become a professional poker player knows Vanessa Selbst’s name. Selbst became a poker player while studying at Yale Law School and went on to set the record for the most consecutive WSOP Open events wins by a woman. She has 3 bracelets, 8 final tables and 20 money finishes at WSOP events.
Selbst also holds the records for highest earnings of a female poker player. It is estimated that Vanessa Selbst has earned about $12 million from various poker events before ultimately retiring in 2018.
In recent years, the issue of the gender pay gap has dominated conversations around the world and across various industries. Unfortunately, research has shown that women are still largely underpaid in comparison to their male counterparts.
The female professionals working in the casino industry also suffer from lower pay, and today we are going to examine the gender pay gap in the business.
Still, all is not bleak. For example, with the numerous live casino options available right now, many women with children have found stable employment that pays fair wages and provides flexible working hours that consequently allow them to balance work and motherhood.
Before we delve deeper into exploring the reasons and possible solutions to the gender pay gap, we should look into the figures that show the payment disparity between male and female employees in the casino industry.
For the purpose of this article, we will use data concerning the British casino industry. The British government demands companies with more than 250 employees to collect and share gender pay data which helps illustrate the problem and hopefully solve it.
Sadly, it seems like the casino industry is experiencing quite the troublesome gender pay gap. Among all full-time employees in the UK for all industries, the gender pay gap was 7.7% in 2023, but the gender pay gap in the casino industry tends to be higher.
Unfortunately, there is no singular gender pay report to encompass the whole casino industry in the country, so we will instead give you information about some of the big gambling companies.
Playtech, a software developer of casino games, reported a mean gender pay gap of 22.1%, a median gender pay gap of 22.2% and a median gender bonus gap of 20% for 2023. Entain, an international casino and sports betting company owning many gambling sites, reported a mean gender pay gap of 15.9%, a median gender pay gap of 4%, and a median bonus pay gap of 44.4%, with only 37% of top-paid positions going to women.
Metropolitan Gaming, a company which operates casinos across the UK and Egypt, reported a mean gender pay gap of 13.6%, a median gender pay gap of 4.2%, and a mean bonus gap of 79%, with the proportion of 70.40% male and 29.60% female employees in the upper salary quartile.
The Hippodrome Casino, one of the most exclusive gaming venues in the capital, reported a mean gender pay gap of 17.8%, a median gender pay gap of 8.9%, yet interestingly, a mean gender bonus gap of -216.7%.
While all of these companies report lower figures than previous years, much should still be done to close the pay gap once and for all.
There are many reasons behind the existing gender pay gap. Naturally, it all starts with the fact that women were not allowed to pursue professional careers for the most of human history, so it is going to take time for women to firmly establish themselves in various industries.
Another reason for the pay disparity comes from the type of employment men and women choose. Female-dominated industries like teaching are much lower paid than male-dominated ones like engineering.
Additionally, women might choose part-time rather than full-time employment, not because they want to, but because they have to if they are taking care of children.
Indeed, motherhood is one of the main reasons for the gender pay gap. Some countries like the United States have no federal paid maternity leave which results in women exiting the workforce and then struggling to find employment later due to resume gaps.
On the other hand, a long maternity leave also negatively impacts female workers as they might miss on promotions, or even worse, might not be employed at all if the employer doesn’t want to pay maternity leave or deal with the hassle of replacing a mother on leave.
Unfortunately, many companies are biased against women, especially those with children. They are often perceived as a liability and less reliable than male workers because they take on more childrearing responsibilities (resulting in maternity leaves and/or sick leaves) even when they have a male partner.
Regarding the top positions, women, as already said, often struggle with career progression, but not always because they have children, sometimes it is literally because they are women. The office culture of the “boys club” is alive and well, meaning that male employers prefer surrounding themselves with other men at the helm.
The casino industry is making progress in terms of bridging the pay gap between men and women, but there’s more to be desired.
Gambling companies such as Playtech contribute their progression towards closing the gap on HR initiatives which educate their workforce on the gender pay gap and intend to remove existing biases.
Such initiatives likely exist in many other firms in the casino industry, yet they are only the beginning.
Concerning more practical solutions, companies can look into ways to support working mothers by offering them flexible working hours or a hybrid working model. Luckily, employers in the online casino industry are already doing that, with many of them allowing for work from home and choosing one’s own working hours.
Perhaps the biggest issue that widens the gender pay gap and ensures it remains the same, is the lack of female professionals at the top. Entain recognises this issue and promises to “appoint, promote and retain women in the most senior roles”.
Once there are more women in high positions in the casino industry, not only the gender pay gap would start closing more rapidly, but bias would decrease.