“It’s not gambling, it’s girl math,” is the headline of an article by Nancy Walecki in The Atlantic, in which she reflects on how the gambling industry is trying to win over female audiences with matcha tea memes, girlboss-style advertising, and prediction markets tied to pop culture. On the popular prediction market platform Kalshi, some wagers focus on whether Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner will get engaged this year, or whether Gigi Hadid or Adriana Lima will wear the coveted Fantasy Bra at the upcoming Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
Juan Francisco Navas, co-author alongside José César Perales of Trampas (Traps), explains that increasing importance is being placed on ensuring that women receive financial education and learn how to invest. Companies, however, are seeking to commercialize this trend through products linked not only to investing but also to speculation.
“The gambling industry tries to present the product it sells as an investment product, even when it is actually more closely related to risk-taking and speculating on a possible outcome,” he says. “In virtually all forms of gambling, a series of cognitive distortions are encouraged or, put another way, distorted ways of understanding how chance works.”
He continues: “The main one in the field of betting is the illusion of control, whereby a person believes they can control the outcomes that may occur. This is linked to a kind of illusion of mastery: ‘If I have specific expert knowledge, I will be able to predict the outcome.’ All of this reduces the perception of risk and turns betting into a false investment opportunity, while obscuring the issue of risk,” he argues.
He notes that the gambling industry targets the interests of very specific segments of the population and argues that it is currently diversifying into activities with greater appeal to female audiences.
“The boys can do the parlays and use words I’ve never heard of, but the girls can use their pop culture and educated guesses to make decisions and trade on Kalshi. I’ll say it time and time again: Kalshi is for the girls,” says one TikTok user. She is one of many women promoting the website on social media, emphasizing that it is the perfect place for women to capitalize on their knowledge of pop culture. Not everyone, of course, is pleased by this trend.
“Here’s the thing: if you’re a young woman who’s trying to use a Kalshi ad opportunity to get ahead, you’re getting blocked right away. And I suggest everyone does the same! You already turned your comments off but we are not going to support you building a platform off that,” says a visibly upset user. “Here’s the thing about women: we acutally have been oppressed for a really long time. And those of us who are awake and intelligent know how to recognize when things are being marketed to us for a bad reason.”
Spain’s Directorate General for the Regulation of Gambling (DGOJ) has produced an analysis of women’s participation in online gambling in Spain to examine how gender influences the sector. The number of female players increased by 23.53% in a single year, meaning that nearly 64,000 additional women engaged in online betting in Spain.
“Historically, gambling spaces were more male-dominated because they were located in environments more accessible to men, such as bars, gaming halls, pool rooms or casinos, closely linked to traditional masculinity,” says Navas. “That has not prevented women from participating in other forms of gambling such as lotteries, scratch cards, or bingo, although recently we’re also seeing many, especially young women, drawn to activities like roulette.”
He points out, however, that gambling promotion is now primarily digital and therefore highly segmented according to the interests of each demographic group. “Hence the push to link women’s financial interest and economic development with very specific bets that may appeal to this population group,” he says.
The Spanish Ministry of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and the 2030 Agenda, which oversees the DGOJ, has opened sanction proceedings against the prediction-market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi for a possible violation of gambling regulations, as they may be operating in Spain without the required administrative authorization.
“Prediction markets are platforms where users buy and sell shares on forecasts about the outcomes of future events, assigning prices that reflect the probability of one outcome or another,” explains the ministry. “For this reason, they are also known as peer-to-peer betting. Unlike traditional betting, these platforms allow users to trade with each other within a market, with the platform acting as an intermediary, facilitating transactions and charging commissions.”
Navas argues that reframing gambling as an exercise in knowledge exploits cognitive distortions, the most important of which is the illusion of control, linked to an overestimation of a person’s ability to predict what will happen.
“The offer works like a kind of bait: although it may seem attractive at first glance, it encourages the person to take on disproportionate risk under the promise of higher returns,” he explains. “Even if they can or believe they can predict an outcome, it’s hard to profit because you’re always playing against the house.”
“In this context, the gambling industry will exploit the human vulnerability of overtrusting one’s predictions while misjudging risks,” he continues. “It will mobilize supposed expert knowledge, offering lots of information about odds, statistics, historical data or analytical charts to give the impression that we can place more trust in our prediction, even though that information is almost always useless for making a prediction that beats the odds the house offers.”
Navas adds that users should be aware that it is very difficult to profit from this kind of knowledge and recognize that the industry’s real purpose in presenting all this data is to make them feel more confident and encourage them to fall into the trap.
It is a trap that also relies on language. To attract more women, many platforms speak of “investment opportunities” and “financial empowerment,” deliberately distancing themselves from the word “betting.” Although pop culture often sits at the center of their marketing narrative, these platforms are, at their core, a form of high-risk financial speculation.
A woman named Rachel told The Cut that she had started using Kalshi to place bets on bitcoin-related markets. She admits that she now uses the app every day. “It’s all-consuming. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone,” she says, explaining that whereas she used to read before going to work, she now spends an hour staring at her screen using the app. “I knew it was getting bad when I started seeing the chart in my dreams,” she confesses.
Navas warns that if the perception of risk is reduced and betting is presented as a leisure activity, or even as something constructive because it is associated with the idea of achieving financial success, people are ultimately likely to lose money.
“The entry point is to present a product that appears to involve very little risk as something normal and even positive. But gambling is an addictive agent, and great caution is needed when engaging with it,” he says. Because, in the end, the house always wins.
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