| Targeting the fairer sex
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According to a gambling research firm, todays
gamblers are more likely to be women than men. With
the general perception of a typical online gambler
being a middle aged man, the stereotype has to change
says gambling researcher Rachel Volberg of Gemini
Research, a Northampton, Massachusetts-based firm
that manages gambling studies.
Two of the firm's recent coordinated surveys highlight that the
percentage of women in the U.S. who reported having gambled rose
from 61 percent in 1975 to 83 percent in 1998, with only a nominal
increase in the percentage of men who gambling during this time
period -- from 75 to 88 percent.
Volberg says, This decades-long rise in female gambling can
be traced to the increasing availability of gaming machines in places
like convenience stores and hotels. Unlike the stereotype slot jockeys
and lotto addicts are more likely than ever before to be women.
She believes that online casinos provide a venue, which is safe
physically and emotionally comfortable, so women are more comfortable
than ever before in gambling behaviors. Volberg says her findings
would seem to predict that female gamblers are fast moving to online
gambling next because it can be done in the comfort of home. Internet
gambling could be a serious problem for women down the line,
says Volberg.
She also explains that women are more attracted than men to such
'convenience gambling', because of sexual differences in the male
and female psychology. 'Men are attracted to games where they can
measure themselves against each other, while women tend to prefer
noncompetitive situations,' she says. Marc Potenza of Yale Universitys
Problem Gambling Clinic offers a medical point of view. Most
neuro-imaging studies consider the brains of male gamblers, whether
sex-based gambling preferences are biological or social in origin
is yet to be determined, he says.
Volberg's four U.S state survey of gender and gambling patterns
supports this conclusion. The Gemini survey concludes that while
men are overall more likely to gamble, women now play the luck-based
lotteries almost as often as men do, while skill games such as poker
continue to be a male-bastion.
Source: Online Casino News
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