Quote:
Originally Posted by LektorAJ
+1
To take NickMPK's list -
1) Passively putting your money into a machine with no control over if you win has nothing to do with poker.
2) Is this stuff like farmville? It's nothing like live poker. If we are including online poker (as I tried earlier) then sexism at the table can't be the explanation for why women don't play it.
3) The lowest common stakes in live play is NL200. What are the stakes outside the highest division of competitive scrabble?
The three activities that exercise the same parts of the brain as no limit poker are:
Business
Politics
Hunting
all of which have a problem with not enough women.
I think the above posts are on the right track. Note that what they say about NLHE could also be applied to Business, Politics, Hunting.
I'm still can't fathom how "business, politics, and hunting" are more similar to poker than Scrabble or bridge. It is true that these games are played at much lower financial stakes than casino poker. But that's why I mentioned slot machines...a claim that women generally don't like gambling for significant money is clearly false looking at the demographics of slot machine players.
Even accepting that your comparisons to business and politics, to say these professions are dominated by men because women inherently don't like them is absurd. Until just a few decades agos, women were presented with many social and even legal barriers to entry in these fields. As these barriers have come down, the percentage of women engaged increases. The number of women in the US Congress and Senate is around 20%, in state legislatures it is 25%, and increases almost every elections. In several areas around the world, this is more like 40%. 40% of MBA graduates are also women, so they are clearly just about as interested in business as well.
(I have no idea about hunting, which seems a particularly inapt comparison anyway as it inherently involves physical violence.)
By contrast, the percentage of women in poker is at most 5%, and decreasing over time. Unlike politics and business, younger women seem much less likely to get involved than earlier generations. If poker is so much like business and politics, why are women flooding into business and politics but fleeing away from poker?