“Every day, we’re proving that we should have been playing the whole time”
—Patrick Mahomes
I joined the gaming industry long ago, most certainly before many of the readers of this article were born. At that time, it was really a man’s world. Back in the day, if one were to throw a dart at a pack of casino executives or managers, there was a very high probability that it would hit a man.
That has changed through time, painfully slowly, with the industry seeming to do the bare minimum to not become a complete pigsty. This slow crawl to respectability has been a bit waylaid, it seems, by the rapid growth and expansion in the U.S. of sports wagering. For, after all, sports, like grunting and thinking that public farting is absolutely hilarious, seem to be a man thing.
It appears the gaming industry believes that men are better at managing all of the important pieces surrounding betting better than women, and this tendency seems to be setting women back in the apparently impossible goal of ever achieving anything resembling equality in the gaming world.
Well, let’s explore this notion that sports are really a man’s domain.
This is where my being older helps a bit, for you see, during my lifetime it was also the case that much of professional and collegiate sports was not only a man thing, but it was a white man thing, for in many instances black people were not allowed to play in the “big” leagues and colleges. And it seems to me that during this time most people just seemed to think that this was the natural order of things and accepted it.
What now seems clear to me is that when the higher levels of sports were dominated by white men it had little to do with skill and talent, and everything to do with the fact that many of the white folks who controlled sports were racist.
I suspect that is why I now believe the relative paucity of women in higher levels of the gaming industry has little to do with talent and a lot more to do with many men in leadership being misogynistic.
I believe this is the problem that needs to be resolved if we really desire to give women a fair shot at things. If one is afraid to address the real issue, the solution will be hard to find.
