“I’ve been giving the same speech for the past 25 years and in those years very little has changed,” says Jan Jones Blackhurst, on the topic of women in gaming and how to break the glass ceiling.
Yes, we’ve been talking about how to increase the number of women in executive positions in the gambling industry for decades. And I can understand if you – now into the second paragraph of (yet another) article on women in gaming – are already muttering “here we go again.” But there’s some news to share this time. Even if there weren’t, it wouldn’t hurt to spend five minutes studying this topic one more time.
Blackhurst, executive vice president for public policy and corporate responsibility at Caesars Entertainment, points out that her company has an initiative with measurable goals. It’s called “50-50 by 2025,” meaning that Caesars wants half of its executives to be women seven years from now.
“It’s going to take changing cultures,” she says. “You can set these agendas. You can hold people to what they’re achieving or not achieving. You can make those numbers move.”
Agreed, gender equality in upper management is an issue that studied in many industries. But Blackhurst suggests that the casino industry should be out front because being in the gambling business requires a “privileged license.”
“I think we should be held to a higher standard,” she says. “What a great example the gaming industry could make. People don’t understand all we do. Think how quickly we could drive to 50-50 and set the standard.”
“We regulate everything else in the gaming industry,” she says. “We regulate responsible gaming and compliance. Why shouldn’t a regulator ask some of the questions we’re asking?”
Blackhurst supports a “gender equality index,” which rates companies based on gender equality policies, employment benefits, and other measures. Participation is voluntary, but the companies that are taking progressive actions will want to respond, she says.
The idea is modeled after The Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index, which evaluates workplace lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer workforce inclusion across the country, based on volunteered information.
“The idea is to showcase best-practice companies,” Jones-Blackhurst says, rather than to call out those lagging. (And, besides, those companies likely wouldn’t self-report.)
Blackhurst also suggests drilling down – that companies look at the gender makeup of their vendors, and specifically the extent to which they have women in management.
Blackhurst was one of two presenters during a luncheon at the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States, held in Miami earlier this month. The other, Holly Gagnon, is president and CEO at Seneca (N.Y.) Gaming Corp. She is also the mentoring committee co-chair of Global Gaming Women, which was created to help females develop professionally and expand their personal and professional success.
For those who want to help, just writing a check to Global Gaming Women isn’t enough, Gagnon says.
“Money is important, but are you authentically representing women and are you an advocate for that?” she says. “The numbers don’t lie. Be aware of the math: industry-wide we go from 50-50 at entry level to less than 22 percent in management.
“So there’s plenty of people entering, but why are they leaving? I’ve looked at study after study; how long are we going to study it before we fix it? It’s not different than doing an employee opinion survey, then not acting on the results.”
But Gagnon also said women themselves could benefit from altering some of their thinking, especially when it comes to self-confidence. She noted that a Hewlett Packard study showed that men would apply for a job with 60 percent of the qualifications; women waited until they had 100 percent of the boxes checked.
“So how much of this is self-inflected pain?” she says. “We’re not swinging for the fences.”
Gagnon relates her own line of thinking when being told that she would be part of a keynote session at the Global Gaming Expo last fall. “I had an opportunity to keynote at G2E, and yet I called friends and said, ‘I’m in a panic, what do I wear?’”
Blackhurst says, “I don’t think its intentional misogyny, I think it’s a lack of intention in leadership.” She calls it unconscious gender bias.
She noted that such mindsets are prevalent in many other industries and pointed to a study related to orchestra auditions. “About 10 years ago, in the major symphony, only 10 percent of the musicians were women,” she says. “Then they started doing blind auditions, now it’s 40 percent.
Overall, Blackhurst says, “Unless you begin to really measure and make evident what’s happening, nothing has really changed.”
