When Margo Gray started in tribal gaming years ago, she immediately noticed her experiences were different from her male peers.
“It’s different for women in gaming,” Gray said during “The Evolution of Women in Tribal Gaming” session at the Indian Gaming Tradeshow & Convention in Las Vegas. “You always have to start at the entry level. … You start in on the hospitality side of it, the hotel side of it.”
Gray, president of Margo Gray & Associates, a consulting group that connects tribal enterprises businesses with corporations, served as the panel’s moderator.
More opportunities are available today for women in tribal gaming. Two of the panelists, Comanche Nation Entertainment CEO Mia Tahdooahnippah and Claudia Gonzales, Chair of Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians, have risen to positions of power in their respective tribes. A. Gay Kingman serves as the executive director of the Great Plains Tribal Chairman’s Health Board and has long been active in tribal politics.
And Chairwoman and Co-Founder of United Women of Tribal Gaming Pam Show has championed and advocated for her peers, despite a rather humbling introduction when she accepted a job as a tribal marketing specialist after 17 years in the corporate world.
“My second day on the job, they put me in a duck suit on the casino floor,” Shaw said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve really made it, haven’t I?”
Later, Shaw was excited when she was invited to a golf tournament with her male peers, only to find out her job was to drive a golf cart and get beer. And she was once chastised by a male peer for crying during a meeting.
“But all of that was necessary. That was just part of my journey in tribal gaming,” Shaw said. “You have to start somewhere. I kind of made my way through the ranks. I’ve been a GM several times, a CEO, a director, and loved every single minute of it.”
The panelists all spoke about adversities they’ve faced. Both Gonzales and Tahdooahnippah steered their tribes through the COVID pandemic over the last year, making sure members were paid and casinos were prepared when allowed to reopen, while also balancing the needs of their families.
Tahdooahnippah said she’d been CEO for about three months when COVID struck; she was also dealing with two properties that had been damaged by flooding. A mother of five children, one of Tahdooahnippah’s first concerns was how to provide for team members with families.
“I had to be mindful that I wasn’t the only one going through that situation,” Tahdooahnippah said. “The rest of our world was going through that and everybody handled it a little differently.”
Kingman, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to serve on the transition team that created the Department of Education in 1979, also assisted in efforts to make sure that tribal gaming wasn’t taxed. And Gonzalez stood up for her tribe when it was more than $350 million in debt in 2015 to make sure that debtholders didn’t direct gaming policy.
“If you think about Indian gaming, it’s really the women’s industry,” Price said. “If you walk through any of these casinos, there’s a majority of women on the floor. There are women in the hotels. … We want to make sure they’re treated equally, fairly. If you’re going to hire a man at this rate and promote a woman to the same position, it better be equal. We still fight some of those battles.”
