Four of the most accomplished women in gaming or in any profession, for that matter came together virtually at last week’s Global Gaming Expo to deliver a message of encouragement and hope in these times when women have never needed them more.
It’s a simple message and a compelling one. It’s about finding your passion, about working hard, about expanding your horizons, about following the rules, it’s about not hesitating to break them. Above all, it’s about believing in yourself.
“Game Changers: Women in Gaming Who Paved the Way” was held October 28 as part of G2E 2020’s Concurrent Education series. Las Vegas attorney and author Jennifer Gaynor served as moderator, joined by panelists Sandra Douglass Morgan, soon-to-be former chairwoman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, former Control Board Chairwoman and state Senator Becky Harris, and the first female to deal craps and manage a craps pit on the Las Vegas Strip, Debra Nutton, now an executive gaming coach with Resorts World Las Vegas.
“You just need to know: ‘You’re good. You’ve got it,’” said Nutton, an industry trailblazer if ever there was one and the inspiration for the title of Gaynor’s new book, That [Expletive] Broad: Women Who Broker Barriers in the Casino and Gaming Industry, which explores both the successes of the past and the challenges that women in gaming are still meeting and overcoming today.
“Sometimes we think the other person has this special sauce that we just don’t have. But we all have our own sauce,” said Nutton. “We all bring something different to the table. And what we bring to the table makes it a better table.”
As Douglass Morgan put it, “Self-doubt can be paralyzing. We can be our own worst enemies. You have to be your best advocate.”
Nutton recalled that it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that women were allowed to deal on the Strip. It was a world that ran on high-octane testosterone, always had, and didn’t want it any other way. But she had a “sauce” all her own. She would become for the many men who resented her presence mightily, “that effing broad.”
“I remember going on auditions and they’d say, ‘Well, we don’t hire women craps dealers.’ And none of this would be allowed today. But it was certainly allowed back then.”
Thinking of those days, when “there were no other women to fight my cause with me,” she said the work she does now as a mentor to others at Resorts World is a source of special satisfaction.
“I’m really one to push for people because I didn’t always have that, and I really could’ve used it.”
Gaynor, who heads her own firm specializing in administrative law and government relations, discovered in researching That [Expletive] Broad that breaking barriers often requires taking “unorthodox steps” that can sharply alter one’s career path.
Harris, an attorney who serves currently as a distinguished fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, readily agreed. “There’s a saying that ‘Well-behaved women never make history.’ So don’t be afraid to mix it up a little bit.”
Nutton, for one, left a career in nursing to work on the Strip. “Originally, I did both, worked at (University Medical Center) in the day and at the Sands at night, with maybe two, three hours sleep in between. So I was always tired. And the Sands was super-challenging. But I knew I could crack it.”
After serving two terms and two special sessions in the Nevada Senate at one point as vice chair of the Judiciary Committee and the committee’s lone female Harris went back to school to earn a master of laws degree from UNLV’s Boyd School of Law, the only advanced degree in gaming jurisprudence in the world.
“I knew there was a depth of understanding about gaming that I didn’t have,” she said. “There I was in my late 40s with all the really smart kids, tech savvy, politically much more engaged, and who knew so much. I just knew I wanted to get as much as possible out of that experience. And what turned out to be interesting is that I didn’t know it at the time but I was learning about my future job.”
Douglass Morgan, who succeeded Harris as only the second woman to chair the Gaming Control Board in its 70-year history, and the first African American to do so, had worked for AT&T and then MGM Resorts International before leaving the private sector to become city attorney for the City of North Las Vegas, a post no African American had ever held in Nevada. But she was a resident there. “It was near and dear to my heart,” she said. It was also one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the country. Then the Great Recession hit.
“It was a very difficult time,” she recalled. “I just remember thinking, this is something bigger than myself. This is about providing services for people just like me who were living in need, who needed to be safe, needed to be secure, needed to have better quality of life options.”
It turned out to be her “defining moment,” professionally and personally.
“I realized when you’re selfless, when you take yourself out of it and you focus on what’s the right thing to do and you’re doing the right thing, you don’t get tired. Coming out of that I had a resilience and a kind of grit and realized that if you go through that you’re pretty much able to tackle anything else.”
Thinking of the parallels with her time with the Gaming Control Board, which she joined on the eve of the Covid-19 crisis, she laughed, “I didn’t expect to go through it again, but probably this is the second one.”
There are obvious parallels, too, with what Nutton and Harris have experienced. It was never their plan to run toward adversity either. Nor did they didn’t run from it.
“I’m very empowered by this younger generation,” Douglass Morgan said. “We say, ‘Here’s the rules and we’re trying to follow the rules.’ But they say, ‘No, the rules need to be totally rewritten, they need to be redone, because these rules don’t help women, or don’t help minorities, or these rules are keeping people in the LGBT community down.’”
There is hope in that, in knowing you can make your own way to the place you want to be. It may be no more than a belief. But belief will have to do, now maybe more than ever.
Harris offered this: “To those women who are forced to re-evaluate their career path, who’ve been furloughed or are contemplating taking a step back, you are in a tough spot. And you have people who love you. Take a minute. Take a breath. Be thoughtful and intentional about what you want to accomplish next. I know the time between now and the time when you may open your next chapter might feel interminable. But there are a lot of things for you out there. There are people who are very worried about the situation you’re in and have a lot of empathy and compassion for what you’re going through.”
It’s an ideal, and yet it’s something quite palpable, the idea that each woman becomes more powerful within the community of all women.
“Women have to support each other,” Nutton said. “We have to be the advocate for everyone else and push them to the top. I think we’re going in the right direction, and I think it’s because of good strong women that will help get us there.”
