PokerStars and Women: Still in the Stone Age

I intended to write about the New Jersey internet gaming bill today. The bill would create the first sanctioned intrastate online gaming system in the country. It was overwhelmingly approved this week by the New Jersey Senate and New Jersey Assembly and now goes to the desk of Gov. Chris Christie for his signature.

As I was getting ready to dig into the meat of the bill this morning, PokerStars sent out a baffling press release from the PCA entitled "Dawn of Woman". It was so tasteless that I decided to hold off on discussing the New Jersey gaming bill until Gov. Christie signs it and to focus instead on the presser.

In its continuing quest to bring more women -- an under-represented demographic -- into the game of poker, PokerStars handed out video cameras to all of its female Team Pros at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas. The women were encouraged to create daily video diaries of their experiences at the PCA. Those diaries would then be uploaded to PokerStars TV.

On its face the idea makes sense. Stars wants to encourage more women to play live events, since the live events are mainly a marketing angle for the online poker client. By showing women what they're missing out on by not playing these events -- from a woman's perspective -- Stars may very well bring more women into the game.

Then came the press release, in which the female Team Pros are compared to "shrieking, howling" Neanderthals who have no idea what to do with their video cameras when they first receive them. The presser goes on to state that the project lead's instructions to the "girls" were "pointless" and "ignored", that "the more 'advanced' women were already dismantling the devices and trying to work out what was inside." It concludes with the bizarre, "The results of all these vblogs are fantastic.. some of the women should definitely stick to poker for a living; others could consider forging new careers as videographers."

I should say that I have plenty of friends who work in Stars PR and marketing, people who are fundamentally good people. Even good people mis-step sometimes, and I don't believe anything overtly malicious was intended by this press release. In fact it is trying to promote women in the game. However the whole thing was sigh- and cringe-inducing. At best it seems like basic marketing was completely ignored while writing this press release.

At a deeper, perhaps more subconscious level, we have yet another case of women being given the short end of the stick by the poker industry. The message this press release conveys is, essentially, three-fold: (1) women are little more than a shrieking pack of Neanderthals; (2) women have almost zero capacity to handle anything "techie" without painstaking instructions from a man which they will ignore anyway; and (3) women are "girls", a term that is demeaning in its own right.

As someone who loves strong, smart, capable, independent women (see, any woman I've dated in the last 6 years), it really pains me to see tired cliches being applied to a demographic that the industry is trying to court. I feel like the poker industry might have better success increasing female participation in poker if it stopped treating women as "girls" and started treating them as people.

You get an "F" for this press release, PokerStars.