WOMEN TARGETED:WOMEN HAVE become hooked on online gambling - an industry worth €400 million in Europe, the US and Canada alone. When BT asked Limerick women in a survey last year to name something that they were ashamed of doing online, 15 per cent replied "gambling".
"The addiction centres are definitely beginning to see an increase in gambling addiction amongst women in the 20 to 40 age group," says Colin O'Driscoll, psychologist and senior manager of The Forest, an addiction treatment centre in Co Wicklow.
"We're not surprised at all, because we predicted it when the gambling industry aggressively targeted young people and women in its marketing of online gambling."
One in three compulsive gamblers is female.
Online gambling has made huge investments in marketing campaigns that attract women by offering girly chatrooms and a feminised image, while on other sites the industry has toned down the traditional James Bond image of poker sites to make them generic, enabling them to double their revenue, O'Driscoll says.
Bedroom bingo via lap-top is an industry success story, and the clientele is 85 per cent female. Many of these women have gained confidence and - tempted by the allure of pop-ups offering more challenging games, and the promises of free play and, then, credit - they have gone on to card games like Texas Hold 'Em and poker. This is why O'Driscoll likens online bingo to "an entry level drug". By the time a gambler has created such difficulties in her finances and relationships that her family seek out treatment for her, she owes three times her annual salary, he says.
Mary Cleary of the support group Amen has received calls from men whose wives are gambling away the family funds - a reverse of the traditional view, of the gambling male. As with alcohol addiction, as women gain equality they also become equal in the territory of addiction.
"I know of one case where a woman addicted to one-armed bandits was able to give them up - but she's still to be found at every late-night card game in the county," she says.
Overall, two-thirds of online gamblers in games of all sorts are female, according to research by Nielsen, and 21 per cent of UK women gamble online attracted by the chance of five-figure payouts, according to the UK's office of national statistics.
In Ireland, many women are gambling online in the workplace, sometimes leading to embezzlement, as they get into debt in their attempts to "beat the house", says O'Driscoll.
Online gambling is a "secretive" activity for women and at home, family members may wonder where Mom disappears to for five hours with her lap-top and why the bills are piling up.
Mood-swings related to the highs and lows of winning and losing may be confusing for the family, who don't know that these vacillations are the result of gambling and not a reaction to what is happening in family interactions.
Not all female gambling is secretive, of course. In the US, casinos have become ever more female-friendly. While we are likely to visualise slumped women past their prime pouring coins into slot machines, the industry is countering this sad stereotype by developing glamorous holiday netherworlds where women can have fun — but it comes at a cost.
In the US, where 48 states have legalised gambling and where 27 states have casinos, 40 per cent of people in treatment programmes are women, compared to just 5 per cent a decade ago. In Iowa, 50 per cent of men and women within a 200-mile radius of a casino have a range of serious gambling-related problems.
"Based on everything we know about the problems associated with a rise in gambling, our best strategy is to actively stop all marketing of gambling," says O'Driscoll.
