My gran’s table always had the same few items on it. A red glass ashtray. A couple of pencils sharpened to razor points. Her glasses. The football pools papers. And her Spot the Ball image.
She played Spot the Ball every week. And every week before the pools man came, she’d have the page divided with a grid, with sight lines drawn onto the players, trying to figure out exactly where the centre of the ball had been airbrushed from the image.
A small stakes, big win game, that had the feel of a skill game but (thanks to the obscure images the Spot the Ball people always chose) was essentially a lottery.
It was football related. But you didn’t need any knowledge of sports to play. And perhaps that’s why she liked it. Because, as a new report is expected to tell us next week, women don’t bet on sports.
Women’s sport has never been bigger
At first glance this seems strange. Women’s professional sports have exploded in the last five years. From England’s victory at the European football championships last summer, to cricket and the Women’s Six Nations rugby, women’s sport has never been more popular. And people are betting on women’s sports events. It’s just not clear if those people are women.
An analysis of sports betting demographics by Morning Consult (USA-focused) showed that the percentage of women who said they would ‘never bet on sports’ was a whopping 74%. Compare that with just 51% of men who reported the same thing.
It’s not that women are not interested in sports (we can see that from the number of women and girls attending major sporting events, in particular female sports events, where female spectators often outnumber males). And it’s not that women are not interested in gambling.
So why haven’t these two elements come together and resulted in a healthy increase in female sports betters?
My mum’s take
Anecdotally, both my mum and my girlfriend enjoy gambling. They like quizzes and games of skill. My mum is a big fan of card games like bridge and poker. They both like games of chance, especially when there is an interactive element (eg. bingo, Play Your Cards Right in the pub). And they watch big sporting events, but rarely bet. If they do it’s very small stakes, and more like a lottery (eg. a random couple of pounds on a horse in the Grand National).
They both prefer the social aspect of gambling to competition. And that seems to be something that is consistent with women.
Time magazine relates the results of a 2014 study. It found that across 37 countries, there was little difference between males and females in terms of sports participation. However when the researchers excluded non-competitive sports, males outnumbered females four to one.
Have men evolved to like competition?
Why do males enjoy competition more than females? Evolution might have the answer. In many species, males gather together to engage in combat or mock combat, to display plumage or song. They do this before an audience of females (and other males) who appear to select the most impressive specimens. This gives these males better opportunities to breed.
This phenomenon is called lek. And while it’s mostly often observed among bird species, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that there might be some conserved evolutionary drives contributing to our own psychology.
After all, our last common ancestor with the fruit fly roamed the planet about 450 million years ago, and yet the motor pathways of the insect central complex are so similar to our own central nervous system that scientists can model the effects of Parkinson’s disease in these animals.
Is Drake displaying ancient evolutionary drives?
The Canadian rapper Drake might present an example of what a human engaging in lek behaviours might look like.
Drake loves sports gambling. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether he wins or loses. He publicises the huge bets he places. When he loses, we’re all very impressed by how wealthy he must be to lose such huge sums and not care about it. When he wins, he shows off how wealthy he is but also how prescient.
Drake can afford to bet more than you. Drake takes bigger risks than you. Drake has won huge sums of money betting on sports. You can see how these kind of behaviours might attract some attention from the opposite sex, and present Drake with increased opportunities to breed.
If engaging in these kind of behaviours doesn’t appeal to women, perhaps we’ll have to reevaluate how to market sports gambling to them.
Could differences in our evolutionary drives guide marketing?
We could do some qualitative research to explore what women enjoy about a day at a big sports event, and whether that differs from their male counterparts. This might give some direction for how we incorporate these preferences into any sports gambling products we market to women.
For example, could we introduce social shared spaces where groups of women could gather to chat and place bets together (as a team), so groups of friends can ‘win together’?
Could we introduce social, activity-based games of chance to normalise betting among groups of friends?
Perhaps offering bets in shared spaces on the total combined number of yellow cards, corners and throw-ins in a football match. Perhaps completing these in rows. And having the game space look and feel more like a game show, with updates in real time, and shout-outs to users who are on a hot streak.
In this way our product could increase how social and interactive the football match is while it is ongoing, rather than having to wait until the end to see if you’ve won (or seeing your bet fail after five minutes because Arsenal have scored and you bet on them to lose 1-0).
What do you think? Do you get many women betting on sports in retail? If so, are they more social than the men who do so? Has the rise of women’s sport also brought an increase in female sports gamblers?
Do you have any other ideas for why women don’t bet on sports as much as men? As ever, let us know.
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