How Young Men and Women Think Differently about Gambling
New polling shows that young men are much more likely to gamble—and more likely to oppose gambling restrictions
Since the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, gambling has taken the country by storm. In 2023, Americans bet almost $120 billion on legal sportsbooks, up from $93 billion the previous year.
New online platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi have managed to fend off state-level regulation by positioning themselves as commodities futures exchanges under federal oversight rather than sports betting sites. They market themselves as providing a socially valuable service (pricing risk accurately), but in practice, they effectively function as sportsbooks; about 40 percent of the volume on Polymarket and over 90 percent on Kalshi is sports betting. YMRI has previously written about the dangers of prediction markets.
The Trump administration’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has effectively refused to enforce the existing rule against sports betting, which means that in practice, “sports betting is now legal everywhere—even in the states where it isn’t.”
In recent months, weekly transactions on prediction markets have skyrocketed. Kalshi and Polymarket have blanketed New York City with ads encouraging people to bet on the mayoral race, and Kalshi has been running social media ads proclaiming “BREAKING NEWS: SPORTS BETTING IN TEXAS IS NOW LEGAL.”
Meanwhile, some data suggest that Americans are increasingly turning against legalized gambling. Over the last three years, the share of Americans who agree that legalized betting is “a bad thing” for society and for sports has increased, according to a survey from Pew Research.
New research has found that online sports betting hurts consumers, particularly young, low-income men:
“The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling” by Brett Hollenbeck, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio found that:
In states with legal gambling of any kind, average credit scores decline by 0.3 percent after four years. In states where online betting is available, however, average credit scores drop by 1 percent.
Among states with online betting access, bankruptcy filing rates increase by 25-30 percent after three to four years.
Collections on unpaid debts increase by about eight percent in states with online betting.
Young men in low-income counties experience higher financial distress, with higher rates of bankruptcy, more usage of consolidation and unsecured loans, and more credit card delinquencies.
The second paper, “Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting’s Impact on Vulnerable Households,” adds another dimension to the story. Authors Scott Baker, Justin Balthrop, Mark Johnson, Jason Kotter, and Kevin Pisciotta analyzed consumer transaction data from over 230,000 households, comparing measures of financial stability, including credit card balances, credit card debt, and bank overdrafts. Overall, they found that “legalization leads to substantial increases in sports betting that do not come at the expense of reduced gambling or consumption.” In other words, gamblers weren’t replacing their weekly poker games with sports gambling; they were betting more overall. They also found that increased sports betting actually replaced investment in the stock market. Roughly, they estimate that $1 of betting reduces net investment by around $2.
Like the authors of the first paper, Baker and his team found that low-income gamblers disproportionately saw negative effects. Households with lower savings balances spend thirty-two percent more on gambling as a share of their income than high-savings households, and households with a history of bank overdrafts spent twice as much as a share of their income as those who did not. Overall, this led to higher credit card balances and less available credit.
These findings have led many—including myself and Charlie Sabgir of YMRI—to argue that governments need to do more to regulate gambling. But what do young men and women think? The latest polling from Young Men Research Project (YMRP) asked a nationally representative sample of 1,000 men aged 18-29 and 300 women aged 18-29 about their personal gambling habits and their support for proposals to regulate gambling.
Across all four types of gambling that respondents were asked about, young men were much more likely to have engaged in it. About half of men under 30 had gambled in a casino, bet casually on sports with friends, played online poker, or paid to access “luck mechanics” in video games like loot boxes at least some of the time. Roughly three-quarters of young women said they never engaged in these kinds of behaviors.
YMRP also asked respondents whether they supported or opposed six different proposals to regulate gambling. Across all six, young men were more likely to have an opinion than young women, and less supportive of each proposal.
Banning gambling mechanics from video games, such as lootboxes (-2 net support among young men, +5 net support among young women)
Banning gambling on professional or pro-league sporting events (-23 net support among young men, -12 net support among young women)
Banning gambling on college sporting events (-11 net support among young men, +3 net support among young women)
Banning gambling on current events, such as political outcomes (+2 net support among young men, +11 net support among young women)
Banning “prop bets” (placing bets on specific events within a future or ongoing game) mid-game events (-12 net support among young men, +1 net support among young women)
Banning live betting (placing bets on sporting events while the game is in progress) (-18 net support among young men, -5 net support among young women)
One explanation for this gender gap—that young men are more likely to oppose gambling regulations than young women—is precisely because they’re more likely to engage in gambling. The Hollenbeck et al. paper finds that gambling is particularly harmful to young men, but it’s plausible that these harms are concentrated among the minority of gamblers who have a problem. If the majority of young men who gamble do so responsibly, it’s reasonable that they might oppose new regulations on an activity they see as an occasional bit of fun.
Regardless of the underlying mechanism, the findings suggest that anti-gambling advocates have their work cut out for them when it comes to persuading young people to support their ideas.
This piece was written by Milan Singh, Founder of the Yale Youth Poll. You can find his Substack here: https://substack.com/@milansingh
 | A guest post by
|