The face of gambling has conventionally been a male one–think Matt Damon’s law-student personality in Rounders, whose desire for high-stakes poker leads to his collapse. Gambling investigator Rachel Volberg, though, is dispelling this stereotype, signifying that slot jockeys and lotto addicts are more probable than ever before to be women.
Volberg, of Gemini Research, a firm that manages gambling studies in Northampton, Massachusetts, synchronized two reviews exposing that the percentage of women in the U.S. who stated having gambled increased from 61 percent in 1975 to 83 percent in 1998. While the quantity of men who gambled also rose during this time period, the rise from 75 to 88 percent was much smaller. In the electronic journal eGambling, Volberg says that this decades-long increase in female gambling could be traced to the rising accessibility of gaming machines in places like convenience stores and hotels. “These venues are physically and emotionally comfortable, so women are likely to feel OK engaging in gambling behaviors,” she notes.
Aside from the comfort aspect, why would convenience gambling, which is frequently a take-your-chances try involving scratch-off cards or lever pulls, draw women in droves? Volberg believes sex differences offer part of the answer. “Men are attracted to games where they can measure themselves against each other, while women tend to prefer noncompetitive situations,” she notes. Her four-state survey of gender and gambling patterns holds this conclusion. While men are generally more probable to play, women now gamble the luck-based lotteries found in supermarkets, gas stations and elsewhere almost as frequently as men do. Games of skill such as poker, though, are still heavily male-dominated.
As most neuroimaging studies think the brains of male players, whether sex-based gambling likings are biological or social in origin is yet to be found, notes Marc Potenza of Yale University’s Problem Gambling Clinic. In the meantime, Volberg notes her findings would appear to forecast that female players will turn to online gambling next as it could be clone in the comfort of home. “Internet gambling could be a serious problem for women down the line.”
Jun 01