It has long been the thought, idea, or image that casino games were played by men, whilst they were accompanied by a woman. If a woman were to be imagined seen gambling, she would be over the age of 60 and inside a bingo hall. This is our embedded ideas of how the sexes play, and it is so embarrassingly out of touch that it may surprise you to learn that women account for 28% of the online memberships across the world online casinos.
How do women fare in the casinos?
Here we will share with you the truth about women and gambling and how the sexes fair when it comes to success and the preference of games commonly selected amongst the female species.
The Fascination of Online Games and Casinos
To begin understanding the complexities of male and female interests in the world of casinos, first, we must understand the appeal of the games.
Online casinos now provide more gaming choices than land-based establishments and it starts with this clear accessibility to the games which sees the drive in the interest from females to gamble. Online operators host a great abundance of games and a far simpler game to play are the slot machines. The online slot is by far the most popular game because it is void of any skill requirement. Press a spin button repeatedly and you do nothing more than pray that you are lucky enough to win.
Choice is always an attractive thing and for the gambler is sweets in a candy shop.
Now, at this stage, it would be wrong to assume that slots are all women play because they would have no interest in card games. Well, you would be wrong. You only have to look at the number of professional female poker players there are to realise that the female chromosome wasn’t void of counting skills.
The fact of the matter is, is that there is no clear analysis out there that says females prefer a specific type of casino game over all others.
Females will also indulge in sports betting, perhaps because of the partner having an interest and success, or through their own passion and curiosity.
But there is a difference when it comes to gaming and that is the approach. Now, you may have already guessed this, that the female would be more cautious than the male, given the male would be wired to take more risks, how far from the truth this is.
What Women Really Want
In 2018, a study was carried out by Grant Thompson, a casino specialist at Casimoose.ca. Through the site’s casimoose.ca/games/slots webpage, they were able to analyse the gambling habits of Canadians, according to gender. The results showed that 31% of those clicking on the slots games were women. This is closely in line with the international statistics, which stand at approximately 28%. What surprised Grant is that the titles of the slots were of no specific ‘type’ that you could easily assume would be appealing to women, suggesting that the theme of the game did not make much of an impact on which gender preferred it.
In 2010, when online casinos began to boom, it showed that the average female membership was at about 3%, so there has been a significant increase in the number of females signing up to join casino companies.
For us to gain a balanced perspective of this, we ask Louise Merkel, Product Chief at game design company GameSlay Inc, about how they approach game design and is there a conscious approach needed to recognise appeals to different sexes?
“Games are a product first and foremost so we have to sometimes be aware that there are still mainly manly things out there and what you might class girly things, right or wrong, they are there, baby girl clothes are predominately pink and boys blue. Because these things are deeply embedded in our culture throughout the world, as a company, you cannot change nor can you ignore this. But what we do not ask is that our team must create a slot that’s ideal for women to play one week and a slot for men the next. Ideas should be natural, and we have a well-mixed team that works on this. I’m sure if we have 100 women and no men, you will still have games being designed in the genres of action and horror which are often associated with being manly games, which we don’t believe is the case.
This can be seen across all mediums, you see it for yourself with girls on Twitch playing games like Amnesia and Paraphobia.”
Does Female Instinct Lead to More Wins?
The interests of women playing online did not go unnoticed by several gambling addiction charities across parts of the UK, Europe, Canada, and Australia. The UK charity Be Gamble Aware logged a 13% increase in female cases in 2020.
An earlier studied showed that the gaming styles between males and females were very much different. The male would be the one to play on the side of caution, perhaps more through experience. Whereas women would tend to continuously try more times leading to more deposited payments.
For males, they were more open to exploring different games, where females would focus on one slot.
When it came to sports betting both shared the same betting habits in just selecting winners from their sport of interest, rather than making a bespoke bet slip of different markets across different sports.
But were women more successful overall? There is a case that womanly instinct may give females an upper hand, but this was not the case, because of how online games are produced and developed, it is entirely about luck and not intuition. Perhaps better served inside of Land-based casinos, but as of now, women seem very content playing their loved games online.