Are Women More Successful At Casino Games

Although gambling has traditionally been seen as a male-dominated activity, the evidence suggests that women are increasingly likely to gamble in 2023, thanks to a gambling sector that offers many more options for gambling other than the traditional betting shop or land based casino.  

The modern online casino industry is conscious of the fact that up to half of its customers and potential customers are women, although this can sometimes lead to some stereotyped marketing ploys, including overuse of the pink colour and an approach that suggests women prefer to play bingo rather than traditional casino games such as roulette or blackjack, for which there is limited evidence.

For online casino sites, most of which use a variety of promotions such as casino birthday bonus and welcome deals to attract customers, it is essential to understand what motivates their customers, and part of that is to fully understand whether it is true that women are more or less successful at playing online casino games than men.

Stock Market Research

As with many aspects of the male-female binary that dominates our culture, the issue of whether men or women are better at gambling has been talked about a lot, but there is little research to back up many of the theories. For instance, one theory is that women are better able to multitask and are less prone to risk, which makes them less reckless when gambling than men. On the other hand, it is sometimes assumed that women are less likely to play games of pure luck.

There is some evidence from the world of stocks and shares to suggest a difference in the way that men and women go about trading shares. A well-known paper by academics at the University of California came out in the late 1990s and showed that women trade significantly less frequently than men but have a slightly higher return at around 2.65%. Similar studies have suggested that men are more reckless at casino gaming and thereby more prone to gambling problems.

Yet such papers have not been able to go further and identify whether there is a clear biological or cultural basis to such differences. Interpreting such results inevitably requires us to closely examine our engrained cultural prejudices and beliefs, which we are often extremely reluctant to do.

Myth and Science

As our understanding of the human brain and how humans operate becomes more sophisticated, the clear trend is towards complexity, rather than simplicity. For example, it was once thought that there was a ‘male’ and a ‘female’ brain but the more we learn about the brain, the more we understand that this is a very simplistic approach. There are multiple areas of the brain that can show a ‘sex difference’ in shape, structure or operation, but even these differences are ‘on average’.

We can see an example of this when we consider height. The average man is taller than the average woman, but that does not mean that all men are taller than all women, and there is a huge overlap. Evolution throws up variations and complexities that defy our attempts to put everything into a binary system. It is certainly likely that many of the supposed differences between men and women are cultural in origin, rather than biological, and these are far from fixed.

Bottom Line

There is another problem when it comes to casino gaming success, in that, casino gaming is fundamentally about luck rather than skill and in the long term, all casino gamers lose money, due to the house edge. It could be that women may be slightly less unsuccessful than men at casino gaming, but the evidence for even that claim is lacking.

Ultimately, the bottom line in casino gaming is that, unlike sports betting and stock market trading and investment, it is a strictly leisure activity that offers no possibility of long term profit. If a casino could identify that women were less likely to play high volatility games, that could be of relevance to the operator, but that is more likely to be a matter of the individual rather than sex. Rather than identifying ‘male’ and ‘female’ gambling traits, or relying on myths, casinos of the future are likely to focus on player well-being rather than perceived gender-based traits. Casinos are expected to leverage the power of big data to understand each player on a granular level. By analyzing a player's betting patterns, game choices, spending habits, and even emotional responses, casinos can tailor their offerings to suit individual preferences.