Monday Mini: Gender Differences in Gambling

More women are gambling. Why, and what does it mean?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Anny and Samantha. I wont for stuff.
I never told you a prodiction if I heard you,
And welcome to another edition of Monday Mini. Today we
are talking about gambling addiction and gambling disorder, so content

(00:27):
warning for that. This has also been something we need
to come back to as a bigger episode. We've been
meaning to talk about.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
This for a while. This is on our list.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
This has been on our list. So this is just
a brief overview because I was thinking about it because
we had this huge power ball jackpot here in the US,
which is just about the only time I gamble.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, I'm not gonna lie any can I tell you?
So in this last month, I've spent probably about thirty
dollars in different lottery things and I've won ninety five.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Oh good for you.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
So I'm like, do I keep playing? I'm having This
is how people get cooked, isn't it? Isn't it?

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yeah? Yeah, but that's pretty good. I feel like the
most I mean I did I also played the slots
Like by that, I mean like I'll bet twenty bucks
at most over several days in Vegas.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
I'll never spend more than twenty at a time. If
that usually is ten, I cap at ten.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, that's I I have a cat. That's it's one
time I did win a thousand bucks. It's pretty sweet.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
I made a sixty dollars five dollars profit. My partner
keeps laughing at maybe that rhetoric.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
I'm like, that's fair, it's fair. And also I pretty
pretty much just paid off my trip with the one
thousand dollars, so it's not I didn't feel like I
actually won that much, even though I did. It was
very useful, but it kind of just went back into
the trip. But anyway, I have recently seen a huge

(02:00):
uptick in ads for things like DraftKings, and I have
to say, we get a lot of ad request for
these types of things.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
True.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Also, my mom reminded me that we were moving into
football season. I totally forgot so football, fantasy football, big
vetting time. So yeah, we thought we would do a
quick rundown on gender differences in gambling. Though, yeah, we're
going to have to come back and do a full
episode because it involves a lot more than we're going

(02:28):
to get into today. Oh my goodness. All right, So
the APA defines gambling disorder like this gambling disorder is
categorized as a behavioral addiction characterized by recurrent and persistent
gambling behavior, which produces emotional distress and leads to economic, social,
and legal problems. Problem gambling or compulsive gambling can have

(02:50):
devastating ramifications, from homelessness to financial ruin, to domestic violence
to suicide, and yet for a long time, research has
ignored how this type of gambling might impact women. Public
perceptions have long painted men as the gamblers, and that
is slowly starting to change, and not always for the better,

(03:11):
as in, we're seeing we're getting the full, fuller picture,
and it's not pretty. A twenty thirteen study found that
problem gambling rates had doubled amongst those eighteen to twenty
five in the US, so about seven to eleven percent
of that age range. That same study found that men
were more likely to take risk and get themselves in

(03:31):
hot water when it came to gambling. They also found
it was related to things like substance abuse, masculinity, and machismo.
So it was sort of like, I'm hanging out with
my friends, I want to show that I'm not afraid
of this, and I'm going to bet of note we've
I mean, we've talked about this before. Things like slot
machines are designed to be addictive, like they have done

(03:54):
their science about how it sets off these areas in
your brain. So that's a thing. However, recently the numbers
have shifted are been more studied, probably especially when it
comes to older women and gambling. A recent small study
highlighted childhood abuse, maladaptive coping strategies, family members, So family

(04:16):
members introducing you to gambling, and accessibility to discrete apps
or methods of gambling for the perceived drives or at
least what we're now seeing, because again it wasn't well studied.
Of women and gambling, studies from twenty eighteen indicate that
the starting aged gambling between genders is about the same

(04:37):
and that women are catching up to men when it
comes to gambling percentages. This study recounted a few other
gender differences. Women prefer things like bingo. The bingo is
the only thing that they outpace men in.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Huh, I've never thought of bingo as gambling, but I
guess it is.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, slot machines. They prefer slot machines, while men prefer
things usually in person. Things like card games are sports betting,
while men see it as a way to win money
or socialize prove their manhood. Generally speaking, all this is
generally speaking, Women use it more often as maladaptive coping

(05:13):
or as a way to distract themselves or make themselves
feel better. Since gambling is stigmatized for women more so
than men at least, it also may keep them from
seeking treatment or even recognizing that they have a problem
at all. When women do seek help, they are less
likely to receive family support than men other than women
in their lives, and some of the quotes from this

(05:36):
study were damning, Like I was flown away by what
some of the participants said, Like some of them were saying,
it's just the truth that women are more responsible for
the home for children and more likely to be blamed,
more shamed than men, and less likely to be supported
by their male partner. So they like one woman was like,

(05:58):
I'm expected to support him in everything if he has
a gambling problem. I had to support him when I
had something, he was not there for me and instead
was angry and ashamed of me. It was really bad.
And it's almost like by when I was reading this study,
it was almost like gambling was so male coded and

(06:19):
caregiving was so female coded that a woman with a
gambling problem is perceived as far worse on multiple scales
because she's letting down her family. Swedish numbers found that

(06:42):
women with compulsive gambling have increased and that they are
less likely to seek help than men. Recent numbers out
of Victoria, Australia indicate that about fifty one percent of
women gamble, compared to fifty six percent of men. A
separate Australian study found that women were also gambling regular early.
About twenty three percent reported gambling once a week. The

(07:05):
UK recently reported about a million women were at risk
for gambling disorder and clearly all of this is underreported
by the way. It's clear that this is stigmatized and
there are a few complications in reporting on this because
a UK another UK study found that when they removed
lotteries like the powerball for instance, No, that's not what

(07:26):
they have, but the percentage of women gamblers have Okay, yeah,
So it's like hard to get down to the nitty
gritty of it of what's going on, but whatever it is,
companies have taken notice. They realized that they were neglecting
this demographic and they have stepped in. They have stepped in.

(07:49):
And one of the ways we're seeing a lack of
regulation does involve the ads, and several of the ads
these days do target women. DraftKings is no joke running
a tailor's themed ad with two women. FanDuel has one
that is outright, like, women are tired of never being
invited to play fantasy football, so if we should play.

(08:11):
Some companies back women's sports and International Women's Day. I
was reading today about how some of them like help
pay for public transit air in here stadiums, like they're
making moves. They're making moves, and several women reported the
ease of social gambling and technology, so they were saying
that now that it's easier and I can kind of

(08:32):
do it in private, that's one of the reasons that
they do it more often. And that they also said
the ads that they consumed as introducing them to gambling
was one of the reasons they got into it. Women
influencers on TikTok or Instagram have also been cited as
promoting gambling easy payment methods, a variety of games, so
there's a huge variety that you can play. A few

(08:56):
Other studies also cited the rise in visibility in women's sports,
which I'm like, yeah, that's We're gonna have to unpack
a lot of that later. Yeah. There's also been recent
reporting on how women in sports are facing increasing abuse
online because of gambling and lost bets. Like several women

(09:19):
in sports have come out and said I'm getting harassed
online and a lot of it is about how someone
lost a bet. Here's a quote from the BBC. Flutter,
the gambling operator which runs Patty Power, said that twenty
four percent of all bets placed through its FANDUL brand
during the twenty twenty four Olympic Games in Paris we're
on women's events, with sixty percent of football bets placed

(09:41):
on women's matches and seventy nine percent of gymnastics bets
on women's events. And people bet on everything, They bet
on everything, and this industry just makes a ton of money.
We're talking billions of dollars. And this is a whole
thing were I said, We're going to have to come

(10:02):
back to it. More research is needed. There were so
many different rabbit holes and thoughts about why this is
happening that just deserve more space than a Monday many
so we shall come back, but in the meantime that's
an overview of what is going on here. Listeners. If

(10:24):
you have any thoughts or any of these rabbit holes
you really want us to cover, please let us know.
You can email us at Hello at Stuffmnever Told You
dot com. You can find us on blue Sky at
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I Never Told You. We're also on YouTube. But we
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(10:45):
as us to our super producer, we seen our executive
producer my AIPN tributor Joe. Thank you and thanks to
you for listening Stuff and Never Told You. Respection of
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