Don’t fall victim to gambler's fallacy in trying to balance gender equality

With our recent hire in Mobilt we have now achieved a 50-50 gender ratio. I did not employ any diversity strategy to achieve this, it happened randomly.

My social media is plastered with egaming companies bragging about their diversity initiatives to gain publicity. I believe we should be focusing on increasing the talent pool by having more women interested in gaming rather than companies setting up individual goals of having a 50-50 gender ratio within their company.

In Mobilt we are trying to teach a different way of thinking and I will explain why I disagree with companies who are pushing for a 50-50 gender ratio within their company.

With our first eight hires we had seven males and only one female. Now six months later and with our latest recruitment starting mid-August, we will have 10 males and 10 females.

The outcome of this was completely organic by just treating all candidates the same no matter the gender, nationality or race. It just happened that nine of the last 12 hires that were best qualified for the positions needed were women.

When we were 88% males, did I wish the next hires would be qualified females? Yes! Did I ever consider hiring someone less qualified to make the office more balanced? No! I always had the philosophy to hire the best skilled individual and not based on which group they belong to.

I have been approached several times to go to diversity courses, but I always reject those because I disagree with the agendas they are trying to push. I also see several major players within the egaming industry pushing that their goal is to have a 50-50 male to female employee ratio, but I never understood how people in the gambling industry wouldn’t understand you cannot control the outcome of randomness.

The right candidate

When you are hiring the best person and giving every applicant the same chance and treating them fairly no matter background, gender or race. You cannot dictate what the split of the different groups will be. The only way you can control the outcome is by being discriminatory and unfair.

If you play roulette you know the odds of red versus black outcomes in the long run is 50-50 but sometimes red comes up 85%-15% and sometimes black 70%-30% etc. You cannot dictate what the outcome should be and your company is definitely not better or fairer just because you have a 50-50 gender ratio.

Hiring someone to try to balance the gender equality of the office is like convincing yourself it is a value bet betting on black after eight straight red numbers showed up in a row. That’s gambler’s fallacy.

Egaming has come a long way and the talent pool gets bigger every year. If I look back to when I moved to Malta 18 years ago to work in egaming, the talent pool was restricted mainly to Scandinavian and UK males. Today we have applicants from all over the world and with a lot of women who want to work in the industry.

The egaming industry’s ultimate goal should be to create a more diverse talent pool instead of having diverse hiring as a goal. If I just look at our applications and candidates sent to us, it is about 65-70% male candidates. When the day comes when we get 50% female applications, we would have raised interest for more women to work in egaming and created a bigger talent pool. I therefore support any initiatives that would raise the interest in egaming.

If we can achieve a more diverse talent pool and at the same time give candidates the equality of opportunity, we will raise the quality of talent in egaming.

It should be the quality and character of the individual and not the group you belong to that should be the decider if you get hired or not.

Andreas Bardun, CEO, has over 17 years’ experience in online gaming at some of the biggest names in the industry, such as Betsson Group and LeoVegas, in various strategic roles from leading trading, strategy and marketing.