Throughout the years the gaming industry has developed vastly, creating new platforms and ways for users to play and enjoy. We’re now seeing casino gaming and some of top block chain games become more popular each day. Many of these activities throughout the centuries have largely been a male-dominated field. Sure, legendary female players like Lottie Deno and Judy Bayley did manage to achieve considerable success despite the restrictions placed upon them as members of “the fairer sex”, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s the male players and bosses who have dominated the leaderboards and corner offices.
As tech industries around the globe attempt to shake off all those unfortunate undertones of misogyny and gender discrimination that once flowed through the veins of Silicon Valley, here in the 21st century, the iGaming industry is also making conditions more welcoming for women, from the boardroom to the breakroom.
3 Reasons Women And IGaming Are Disrupting Gaming
Evening out the Playing Field
For such a young and fast-paced industry, the global iGaming industry has been rather slow on the uptake when it comes to handing the reins of power over to qualified and capable women.
Throughout the lower levels of the industry, there have been equal numbers of both female and male workers, but the people who hold director and chief executive positions in iGaming companies have typically been, for the most part, male.
A 2019 report conducted into equality in the industry found that when it comes to iGaming brands, only 17% of CEO positions were held by women. This was even less than the percentage of top dog roles held by women in the brick and mortar casino gaming sector, which was itself a meagre 22%.
However, things are slowly beginning to improve. Just are there are more and more enterprising women taking control in digital and sports companies, there are now more influential women involved in senior-level positions than ever before in iGaming.
iGaming’s Female Leaders
France’s Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, for example, is president of L’autorite Nationale de Jeux (ANJ), the country’s national gambling regulator. Having already proven her formidable strengths as a leader in her role as State Councillor for France’s National Commission for Data Protection, as the president of ANJ she oversees and regulates the country’s lucrative real money gaming market, including casino gaming, horse racing, and lottery games.
A similarly challenging role in the Belgian Gaming Commission was recently won by Magali Clavie, a former magistrate and president of the Superior Council of Justice. Clavie took over from Etienne Marique in April 2020 and has seamlessly maintained the commission’s famously tough stance on gaming practices.
In fact, Clavie was one of a number of significant female appointments in 2020. Software development specialists GAN appointed Karen Flores as their new CFO, and performance marketing brand XLMedia took on Sarah Clark as Chief Transformation Officer, while Japanese developer Ganapati brought in new a CEO in the form of Juliet Adelstein.
They’ve joined Claire Milne, Gamstop’s Fiona Palmer and Jenny Watson, Camilla Rosenberg Director General of Sweden’s Spelinspektionen, and Casinos Austria’s CEO Bettina Glatz-Kremsner as powerful, influential, and capable female voices in the global iGaming market.
Girl Gamers aren’t Holding Back
This slow but steady shift towards equality can also be seen on the consumer side of the iGaming industry as more becomes known about the real money gaming habits of female players, whether that’s their spending habits on sites like yesgamers or how much they wager when playing online casino games, as a couple of examples.
The gaming industry as a whole is jam-packed with diverse gaming genres in which female players are making their presence known. Women are just as likely to engage with genres like action, battle royale, and iGaming variants like digital roulette as male players, or even more so in some cases.
Gone are the days of gaudy, pink “online casinos for girls”; instead, female players are signing up for prestigious online tournaments and honing their skills playing digital casino games before breaking into the live game circuit.
Muskan Sethi, India’s first professional female poker player (she was even honoured by the president of India for her success in the game), put the hours and years in online before being given a shot to compete in a televised tournament. Meanwhile, on the eSports side of the coin, SSSniperWolf and Fangs are just two women gamers who regularly welcome millions of viewers to their live gaming feeds.
