For a little more than a year and a half, Val Martinez has curated the website Betting Ladies. Launched by Martinez during SBC Summit North America in May 2023, Betting Ladies has become an essential source of information for women interested in sports betting.
The most-asked question Martinez gets hearkens back to the essence of gambling: How do I make money?
“I’m not kidding, this is the most asked question,” says Martinez during an interview with CDC Gaming. “You need to explain it needs to be a balance between the message of responsible gambling and making your own opinion about what is the best bet.
“We have people in the community, they spend six hours on a spreadsheet — I’m not joking — looking at stats before they place a bet. And then we have people who are new to sports betting, they copy and paste our bets and bet that.”
Betting Ladies has grown steadily since its launch. There are posts about picking a sportsbook and creating sports betting plans, interviews with female thought leaders in the industry, and guides to betting by state.
Martinez says the site has seen an uptick in visitors over the last few months that coincides with the start of the NFL season. As with men, football is the most bet on sport by women, although there is interest in the WNBA and other women’s sports leagues.
One trend that has emerged: Women have proved to be savvier bettors than their male counterparts.
“There are studies that say that the ROI for women is 19.4% compared to minus 4% for men,” Martinez says. “So, some women do make money.”
For new bettors, Martinez recommends simple wagers, notably the moneyline, because it’s simple to explain. Prop bets – for instance, how many rushing yards a football team or player accumulates – are also easy to understand,
Martinez will not recommend a particular betting site, saying it’s a matter of personal preference. But she will admit that FanDuel (a sponsor of Betting Ladies) and its CEO, Amy Howe, produce content that welcomes female wagerers.
‘I think that the fact that you have a woman in a leadership position brings attention to this subject, which we have not seen,” Martinez says. “In 2018, at the beginning, when it was like a land grab, as I said before, it’s normal to go for the biggest share of the market, which is men, even as much as 72% in some surveys. But now I think Amy has an advantage because she’s paying attention while others are not.”
Since the site’s inception, Martinez has noticed little movement in the sports betting landscape, particularly regarding women. But things are slowly changing. Academia is starting to pay attention, and Betting Ladies is partnering with the University of New Haven on a study that describes the differences between men and women bettors.
“Some of the data I heard from the professor (Ceyda Mumcu, Ph.D) that is running the study is very different from what we know so far,” Martinez says. “For women, it’s fascinating. So, I’ve seen academia paying a little bit more attention, and I think that’s the starting point, because … it’s the intellectuals that push the subject to the front. And then I think business will come.”
