A man’s world?
You could be forgiven for thinking that gambling is a man’s world and that imagery is often endorsed in the movies. Paul Newman and Robert Redford play a dastardly duo in The Sting, preparing to get their revenge on an illegal gambling outfit. In the musical Guys and Dolls, the men play craps underground while their partners bemoan their miserable lives and how useless their menfolk are. Oceans 11 has the male lead being released from prison and then pulling together the gang to perform an elaborate heist. While Julia Roberts has a starring role, she is not the mastermind behind the robbery.
In general, the movie industry might, at best, depict a woman dreaming of winning the lottery, but the hard graft is handled by the men. However, two movies based on true stories are a better reflection of what is really happening in the gambling industry, where women play a prominent role (but without the crime). In 21, the crack team of MIT undergraduates who game and beat the Las Vegas casinos have women in their ranks. Molly’s Game is the true story of the 26-year-old woman behind the world’s most exclusive, high-stakes underground poker game.
Truth versus fiction
While male industry bosses outnumber women at senior executive level, this is probably no different to industry as a whole. When it comes to taking part in gambling activities, women make up a smaller share of the market but are contributing more heavily to certain gambling verticals. Three times as many UK women are likely to have taken part in bingo and keno in the last month than men. Women are also twice as likely to buy online scratch cards. According to You Gov, women over-index on online casino slot games as well (18% v 14%)
Regardless, women are most definitely bossing it in the gambling industry, with many top jobs filled by women and, in the case of Denise Coates, actually pioneering a global market area. It could be argued that without her, we might not even be in a position to think about the latest casinos available to players in the UK – she really did get the ball rolling!
Denise Coates
Denise Coates is the founder of Bet365 – her father owned a chain of betting shops in Stoke-on-Trent. After graduating from Edinburgh University, Denise Coates saw that the world was moving from physical to virtual environments. She convinced her family to buy the Bet365 URL, which would ‘do what it said on the label’ and allow gamblers to have a flutter three hundred and sixty-five days a year from wherever they choose.
Next, she persuaded them to mortgage the physical shops and use the capital raised to invest in developing its own software. She now heads a global brand and is the UK’s richest woman. Not bad for someone who started out from a portacabin in a parking lot – although she did have the seed capital so many lack.
She might have started with sports betting but rapidly expanded the offering to deliver the full online service, including traditional casino table games, slots, and lotteries.
Bet 365 employs over three thousand people at its Staffordshire headquarters, and Coates was made a CBE for her services to the community and business.
Ruth Parasol
Businesswoman Ruth Parasol was one of four founding partners of the Caribbean-based PartyGaming that launched PartyPoker.com in 2001. The company merged with rival BWin and went beyond online poker to offer every element of online gaming, including sports betting, poker, and casino games. Subsequently, Entain PLC acquired BWin and PartyPoker.
Parasol is now worth more than $960 million and has a global property portfolio. Following the success of her online gaming brands and the company’s IPO on the London Stock Exchange in 2005, she sold her interests and reportedly dedicates her time to raising her children, philanthropy and overseeing her international private investment office.
Vanessa Selbst
Vanessa Selbst has made her money by winning at gambling – she plays poker professionally and, by most metrics, is the most successful female poker player of all time. Her live poker tournament earnings amount to over $11.9 million. She is the only woman who has ever been ranked first on the Global Poker Index and won no less than three Poker World Series.
The forty-year-old American is the only poker player to have won two North American Poker Tour titles in a row, bagged twenty-one live poker tournaments, and picked up six-figure sum purses. Born in Brooklyn, she attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but transferred from there to Yale, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Law. In 2018, she left the casinos behind and now makes her millions as a hedge fund trader – some might argue this is just gambling in another form.
Jette Nygaard-Anderson
Jette Nygaard-Anderson was the Chief Executive Officer at Entain PLC. The Danish national might not have been a business founded like Coates and Parasol, but she was regarded as an innovator and pioneering leader. Appointed to the position in 2020, she was in overall charge of casino and sports betting. She oversaw the development of Entain’s massive portfolio of brands, including Bwin, Coral, PartyPoker, Sportingbet, and PartyPoker.
Unfortunately, she did not see eye to eye with activist shareholders who accused her of a scattergun approach that resulted in “an empire-building, shareholder value-destroying strategy.”
Nygaard- stepped down in 2023 amid investor pressure but claimed to have transformed the business to one with the highest standards of compliance, governance and player safety. She said she had left the company ready for further growth in all markets and remarked,
“Over the past four years, we have dramatically shifted the company to be a responsible operator, a reputable employer, strategically put the customer front and centre of business operations, worked on transforming the technology to make it future-fit, diversified the portfolio, and so much more.”
The run-in saw her receive a payout of up to £4.3 million ($5.44 million) after being classified as a “good leaver.
The future for women in gambling
It seems as though most of the women have ‘cut’ while they were ahead and gone on to develop alternative interests. However, a new generation is ready and waiting to take up the mantle, including Amy Howe of Fanduel and founder of GeoComply, Anna Sainsbury.