Why aren’t there more female football bettors?
I wanted to find out how many female football bettors we have on the site. I have some really depressing statistics to share with you;
- Women account for about 3% of all people who visit The Footy Tipster.
- Women account for about 11% of all people who follow The Footy Tipster on Twitter.
Unlike some football related websites who adorn their pages with semi-naked women and generally get on like a collection of sexist blokes we have always had a strong stance against that type of stuff. So we don’t think it is our site in particular that is doing poorly.
Do women like football?
Maybe we have such terribly small amounts of women on our site because there just isn’t that many women into football? All research I have read would suggest otherwise. Looking at research conducted by Kantar we can see that in many countries the gender split is around 50/50.
The UK (where we got a lot of our traffic since we write in English!) comes in at around 25%, which is still a hell of a lot more than the numbers we are seeing.
Do women bet?
The research I have found, along with anecdotally knowing plenty of women into football shows that we know there isn’t an issue with women being into the sport. So why are so few women betting?
I found some data from 2014 that would suggest that it isn’t just that women aren’t finding The Footy Tipster, they just aren’t betting much on football at all. Depending on age group the percentage of women who were betting online jumped between 1-3%.
We need to do better to get more female football bettors!
I think as a football betting community we need to do a better job of making sure that women feel comfortable being part of our community, sharing their thoughts on matches and opinions on bets.
The same article linked above showed much higher numbers for betting on horses. So we know that women aren’t adverse to the idea of betting, they just don’t seem to like betting on football.
Sexism is baked into the sport
It is a sad fact that blatant sexism is baked into football. At some point in history it was decided “football is for boys” and idiot marketers ever since have been saying “I know what boys like, boobs”.
I typed in “female football fans” looking to find a decent image of football fans and was confronted with a whole host semi-naked models.
Diversity is better for everyone
Having more diverse communities is better for everyone. There are more points of views being shared, more data to work from and different dynamics within a group.
One of the things we are trying to foster within The Footy Tipster is an excellent community of people. Ian’s tips are fantastic but without a community of people giving feedback and sharing their own ideas we wouldn’t have much of a site at all!
A call to action
I want to try and find out exactly what is turning women off betting on football. If you could please share this article with as many female friends as you have who you know are into football and ask them to comment and share themselves.
Are you a female football bettor? Please comment with your thoughts on the subject or if you would rather email me privately my email address is toby@thefootytipster.com
Are you a man who has an opinion on women and football betting? I dare say one of the issues faced by women is too many men with opinions, but we still welcome yours! Comment or email me at the address above.
Call people out on their bullshit. If you see a football related website being sexist, call them out – tell them this isn’t what you want and they are losing respect (and money) by continuing to do it. We recently tweeted about the type of thing I am talking about.