About 10 years ago, Jan Jones Blackhurst got a cease-and-desist order from a gaming operator after showing a photo of a company’s senior management during a speaking engagement.
A reporter recognized the CEO and mentioned the photo in a tweet. Jones Blackhurst said nothing slanderous and didn’t call out the company. She simply held up the photo of 12 white men.
The order was filed, because it “was damaging their reputation,” Jones Blackhurst said Thursday during a Keynote Fireside Chat with Lottery.com chief legal officer Katie Lever at SBC Summit North America at the Meadowland Exposition Center. “I called the CEO and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said that everybody was so upset; we looked so bad. I said, ‘The picture is on your website!’”
Jones Blackhurst, the first female mayor of Las Vegas, has long been a trailblazer in the gaming industry. Her accomplishments include establishing one of the gaming industry’s first environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs in 2005, while working for what was then Harrah’s Entertainment (now Caesars Entertainment).
“What we said was we don’t just have a responsibility to how much money we make,” Jones Blackhurst said. “We have a responsibility to our communities, we have a responsibility to our employees to invest in them, and we have a responsibility to our customers to be socially responsible and to have robust responsible-gaming programs. It just made simple sense.”
Now, almost 20 years later, Jones Blackhurst said everyone is finally on board with ESG, because the benefits are tangible and improve businesses. Noting that European gaming operations have felt the brunt of onerous regulations, because of missteps, Jones Blackhurst said, “Being ahead of this keeps bad decisions from being imposed on the industry.”
Jones Blackhurst is especially passionate about diversity in the gaming industry. She said that she’s been “giving the same speech” about the benefits of having women in executive positions for years” and that many companies say that they are amenable to diversity, but want to promote individuals based on merit.
She replies that the data and studies posted by organizations like Bloomberg and financial houses indicate the highest-performing companies have the most diverse senior-management teams.
“They’re higher-performing on all metrics: sales, EBITDA, I could go on and on,” Jones Blackhurst said. “That would tell me that if you don’t have a diverse senior-operating-system team, indeed you don’t have a meritocracy.”
When Lever asked why diversity is rare at the upper levels of the gaming industry despite evidence that shows how beneficial it is, Jones Blackhurst had a simple answer: “Because it’s hard.”
“It’s not going to happen organically,” Jones Blackhurst said. “This is not evolution. If you go back three years, you could say there wasn’t a pool of high-quality women. But that’s not the case anymore.”
The only way the gaming industry will diversify, Jones Blackhurst added, is if CEOs start pushing for it.
“Trust me, if you give it to the human resources department, it will never happen,” she said. “They’re not empowered. The CEO has to say, ‘This matters to people.’”
