Gaming industry can lead the way in gender equality

By Jan Jones

Sunday, Aug. 30, 2015 | 2 a.m.

As he does every August, Brian Greenspun is taking some time off and is turning over his Where I Stand column to others. Today’s guest columnist is Jan Jones, former Las Vegas mayor and executive vice president of Caesars Entertainment Corp.

As a woman who’s been involved in government and corporate America for several decades, I’ve been speaking and writing about the role of women in government and corporate America for almost as long.

Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like I’ve been beating my head against a wall for 25 years … and it’s starting to hurt.

Twenty-five years ago, I’d talk about the small number of women in leadership positions in business and government. That hasn’t really changed.

Twenty-five years ago, I’d talk about how women are held to different standards than men, and how traits such as strength and determination are seen as appealing qualities in men, but “overbearing,” or worse, in women. That hasn’t really changed, either.

And 25 years ago, I’d talk about how women’s appearances are judged completely differently from men’s. As former Texas Gov. Ann Richards once said, “I get a lot of cracks about my hair, mostly from men who don’t have any.” Does anyone think that’s changed?

Any delusions that women have shattered the glass ceiling should be put to rest. Despite the fact that women make up 57 percent of the labor work force and, in 2012, earned 60 percent of all master’s degrees, gender inequality in the workplace remains a very real and long-unaddressed problem. According to the Pew Research Center, just 26 women serve as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, a paltry 5.2 percent. Women make up 53 percent of new hires but only 37 percent of managers, 26 percent of vice presidents and 14 percent of executive committees. Women make up less than 16 percent of the Fortune 500 board of directors, and astoundingly, in the entire history of the Nevada Gaming Control Board there has only been one female member, and that was 20 years ago!

The lack of progress is unacceptable.

For many years, the excuse for why there were so few women in corporate leadership roles was that there were so few women in corporations in general. In other words, there weren’t enough women in the pool to produce more women in leadership positions. It seems that excuse just doesn’t work anymore. The pool is plenty stocked!

So, what will it take to get different results?

Most great social transformations require a champion — a person, an organization or a sector that leads the way (often, it takes more than one). That was true of women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement (which remains a work in progress) and the gay-rights movement.

Can the gaming industry be that champion for increasing the prevalence of women in corporate leadership roles?

On one hand, the statistics I cited demonstrate that the industry has hardly been a beacon of progress.

On the other, gaming has proved it is open to strong female leaders. In 1977, Claudine Williams took over as the chairwoman of Harrah’s, a position she held until the late 1990s. Margaret Elardi owned and operated the Pioneer and Frontier casinos for more than four decades. Jeanne Hood served as president of the Four Queens from 1977-93. And there continue to be truly exceptional women leaders throughout the gaming industry.

In addition, the industry has repeatedly demonstrated its visionary leadership — from building cities in the desert to creating customer-loyalty programs that have been emulated throughout the service industry.

So, yes, I believe the gaming industry can lead the way. But how?

If we’re really going to transform the role of women in leadership roles, we have to transform expectations. We need to set high goals for gender equality and admit that anything less is a failure.

So I want to put those expectations in writing and create incentives for gaming companies to improve their results. In so doing, the industry can set an example for the entire business community.

Fortunately, we already have a model to emulate: Since 2002, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation has released an annual rating of American companies based on their workplace equality for gays, lesbians, and bisexual and transgender employees. In 2015, 781 businesses voluntarily participated in the HRC Corporate Equality Index, and 366 received a perfect score, including Caesars, Cosmopolitan, MGM Resorts and Wynn. There has been real change in workplace equality.

It worked because companies want to attract top talent, and they know the best way to do that is by publicly welcoming the best and brightest. These companies didn’t just participate in the ratings process; they changed their policies to improve their scores and improve their appeal to prospective employees.

I want to create a similar tool that will encourage companies to make their workplaces more attractive to female leaders.

It revolves around establishing clear measures — and clear expectations — of each company’s practices when it comes to the role of women in corporate leadership. For example:

What percentage of their board of directors is female? We should create the expectation that at least 30 percent of the directors on gaming industry corporate boards should be female. Of the five largest casino companies, only MGM Resorts meets this standard. Just one of 11 members of the board of Las Vegas Sands is female. And Caesars, Wynn and Melco Crown have no female board members.

What are each company’s average salaries for men and women who do the same work and have comparable experience? Britain recently implemented a plan requiring companies with 250 employees or more to report their own gender-pay gap. British Prime Minister David Cameron noted the disclosures “will cast sunlight on the discrepancies and create the pressure we need for change, driving women’s wages up.” Just like with the HRC’s Equality Index, the idea is that transparency will create a powerful incentive to address the problem.

What is each company doing to allow more women to play a role in creating a new work culture? In many respects, this is the biggest challenge, because it requires genuine vision to recognize that most workplace cultures were created to meet the needs and preferences of white males. We need to change that culture to be more hospitable to the female talent pool.

This is all very ambitious, but fortunately, Las Vegas has a unique asset that can help the gaming industry chart a new path: UNLV, and The Global Gaming Institute. Just as the University of Southern California serves as an academic partner for the entertainment sector, and Stanford provides support to the tech world, UNLV plays a similar role for the gaming industry.

Of course, it shouldn’t escape anyone’s notice that both the entertainment and tech industries are under fire for how they treat women. They, too, need someone else to set an example. And who better than the gaming industry and UNLV serving as catalysts for change?

Albert Einstein once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” It doesn’t take an Einstein to understand the benefits to all of us in closing the gender gap. It is time to stop doing the same thing over and over. It is time for me to quit giving the same speech. It is time to start driving institutional change. We can start right here in Nevada.