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Gaming
Can diversity in eGaming become a safe bet?
any other sector of industry. This opportunity should be open to anyone, even though gambling has an image of being very male dominated.”
Missing a trick
Jon Tricker, KPMG Gibraltar’s managing director, interjected: “Fundamentally a woman’s brain is different to a man’s and operates in different ways when talking about the same thing.” He came from a background of working with six male partners, and Swindale was the only KPMG female partner in a group of seven! “We are missing a trick in not having more of the different perspectives women can bring to help grow the business,” he concluded.
A poll of some 300 delegates at the April 2017 KPMG Gibraltar eGaming summit revealed that threequarters had 10% or fewer women on the executive team of the gaming company they worked for, or were most closely associated with; “that was quite a wake-up call,” Swindale confessed.
She noted: “We are talking about the commercial benefit of having women in the team and we are focused on the idea about understanding what it might take to encourage more female involvement in businesses. Several research studies have shown that women are not getting the same opportunities or treatment.”
Agreeing, Nyreen Llamas, chief strategy officer for Addison Global, said: “Women always bring a different perspective and it is of value; we don’t always get it right. Different men bring different perspectives and different women bring different perspectives. The more diversity that you can have in the pool, the more you are going to get out – it is exponential.”
Balancing work & home
Donna Del Greco, Betvictor’s head of legal / general counsel, said women should consider what the organisation’s attitude towards female career progression and work/home life balance, and advised: “If either cannot be offered, then the woman needs to be able to recognise this and decide whether she wants to remain in the organisation for the long term and petition for change.”
Swindale suggested: “It’s about achieving a balance. We need to learn that confidence is self-awareness; confidence is an innate belief, it isn't about being good at self-promotion.”
Elicia Bravo, chief strategy officer at
Continued overleaf
Self-help is possibly the best way for women to gain deserved recognition in the largely male-dominated eGaming industry, according to a group of key executives, reports Ray Spencer
not for them.” KPMG research addressed the myth that
women were less confident and explained that women simply tend to present themselves differently than men in interviews. Women typically were “brutally honest and forensically self-analytical about their abilities”, whereas men were more likely to ‘self-promote’, which can lead to “incorrect assumptions that men are better”, Micky Swindale, KPMG’s director responsible for technology, reported.
Dawn Adams, transformational director at William Hill, declared: “I used to work for a company (in a different sector) which had a mentoring programme and it was evident that junior staff felt the need to ask permission to go for a promotion.”
She recalled not being able to do technical drawing at school and having “to negotiate my way into doing advanced maths. Businesses can change that experience by working with children in schools and having development managers”.
When working for newspapers in the 1980’s it was a male dominated environment, but “when they started to bring technology to the fore you could really feel the diversity and flexibility in the roles that technology brought,” Adams said.
Picking up that point, Neil Banbury, UK general manager for Kindred, noted: “The reality is that the sector we are in – entertainment, technology – is offering more opportunity to work in an exciting field with more transactions per second than in almost
Senior management participants in the Diversity Round Table discussion
Women mentoring each other, targeted female recruitment, gaming advertising, and collective lobbying of government for improved childcare benefits and facilities were all identified by the sector’s eight women and one man taking part in the KPMG (Gibraltar) 3rd annual ‘Roundtable’ event organised in conjunction with Gibraltar International Magazine.
A general lack of confidence by women
and their self-doubt on personal ability were quickly identified as key obstacles to having a more gender balanced workforce. As Cristina Turbatu, technical lead at Playtech, noted: “If someone advertises a job, with most women, if they don’t tick 80% of the [requirement] boxes, they don’t apply. I see a lot of male applicants with a similar level of qualification, who think they still will go for the job.”
Turbatu, who is also managing director of not-for-profit Girls in Tech Gibraltar, revealed: “In some cultures girls are encouraged to go into maths and technology, but even from an early age in Gibraltar, US and the UK, they are distanced from maths and sciences and it is regarded as boys stuff; girls don’t have the option to study applied maths and they grow up with the idea that it’s
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