Former L.V. mayor spotlights glaring lack of women in top gaming jobs

Caesars Entertainment Executive Vice President Jan Jones Blackhurst listens to a question during her talk at the 16th International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking at the Mirage on Wednesday, June 8, 2016.

Jan Jones Blackhurst stood in a large ballroom at the Mirage on Wednesday and showed an image that she said illustrated a critical issue for the casino industry.

It was more than a dozen headshots of executives from a certain gambling company. All but one were men.

Jones Blackhurst, Caesars Entertainment Corp.’s executive vice president of government relations and corporate social responsibility, told the audience that she was not “picking on” that particular company, apparently Scientific Games Corp.

“It would be the exact same picture of any executive team that I happen to showcase,” she said.

Rather, Jones Blackhurst was trying to show that, in both the casino industry and in business at large, there are not nearly enough women in leadership roles. And she said that needs to change.

Jan Jones at Gambling Conference

Caesars Executive Vice President Jan Jones Blackhurst talks about the dearth of women in leadership roles in the casino industry during the 16th International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking at the Mirage on Wednesday, June 8, 2016. Launch slideshow »

Jones Blackhurst, who is also a former two-term mayor of Las Vegas, used her keynote speech at a major gambling academic conference as a rallying cry for gambling companies to add more women leaders.

She said research has shown that female senior executives generally earn significantly less than their male counterparts — and it’s not an education problem.

“Women vastly outnumber men in the pipeline that is higher education,” Jones Blackhurst said. “For years, you’ve heard companies say, ‘Well, there just aren’t enough qualified women.’ The statistics now show that that is just entirely inaccurate.”

She delivered the speech at the 16th International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking, which is bringing some 600 academics and others from around the world to the Mirage this week. Attendees are presenting research and examining various gambling-related issues at the conference, which is presented by UNLV’s International Gaming Institute.

Jones Blackhurst cited numerous statistics in an effort to both underscore the problem and show how more female leadership would be good for business. Companies with the greatest percentage of women on their boards, compared to those with the lowest, have a 53 percent higher return on equity, a 32 percent higher return on sale and a 66 percent higher return on investment, she said.

And she dismissed a notion — one she said she hears repeated “all the time” — that women “just have to be better negotiators.” Women would speak up more if they had access to transparent information about pay disparity, she said.

Jones Blackhurst said research had also demonstrated that most senior executives reported not having a formalized goal for achieving gender parity at their companies, and that only a small percentage of men believed women had fewer opportunities for advancement.

“If we say there’s not a problem, then nobody’s focused on fixing the problem,” she said. “Statistics don’t lie — there is a problem. Ninety-five percent of CEOs are white male; 85 percent of senior executives are white males. How can we sit and say we’re moving toward equality, when in fact we’re not moving all?”

To keep businesses accountable, Jones Blackhurst suggested taking a page from the playbook of the Human Rights Campaign. The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights advocacy group has for years published its Corporate Equality Index that gives companies a score for their policies related to LGBT employees.

Jones Blackhurst relayed support for establishing a similar index for women’s equality, one that could look at such issues as the balance of gender among executives and board members, pay policies and mentorship opportunities.

Jones Blackhurst’s speech on female leadership came the same week that Hillary Clinton became the first woman in United States history to claim a major political party’s nomination for president. And the timing was not lost on Bo Bernhard, executive director of the UNLV gaming institute, who said before the speech that Clinton’s accomplishment had set the stage “extremely nicely.”

Later at the conference on Wednesday, an academic discussion picked up the theme of women in gaming. There, UNLV assistant professor Toni Repetti presented an overview of research about women in the workplace — and, in particular, hospitality and gaming.

According to Repetti, as of several years ago, there were no women chief executives among the top 13 hospitality companies included in the Fortune 500, despite the fact that women make up about half of the workforce.

For the gaming industry specifically, she spoke about research showing that there were few women in management roles. But she did not have a lot to work with: Repetti said there were “probably five studies, if that” regarding women in gambling operations.

The first known academic work on the subject was based on 1996 data, Repetti said, and it showed that 23.7 percent of the senior executive management in Las Vegas was female. The majority of those women held positions in human resources, marketing or finance and hardly any CEOs or general managers were women, according to Repetti.

Updated research in 2001 showed that 24.8 percent of management teams were women, 32 percent of which held gambling positions. The other 68 percent were in nongambling roles such as human resources, marketing, special events and conventions.

Repetti said there had been no more recent academic study on that particular subject.

However, she did review other work that outlined different factors that motivated men and women in casino management, as well as a study of dealers in Macau. She also showed data indicating that women made up a small percentage of seats on the boards of top gambling companies — some did not have any female board members at all.

Still, she was generally disappointed that there had not been more academic examination of women leaders in the gaming industry.

“As you can see, the lack of research in gaming is ridiculous. If we want to make a change in the industry, we need to do research on it,” Repetti said.

The gambling conference, which is held once every three years, ends Friday afternoon.

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