ABSTRACT
Introduction: Women and Gambling Legal gambling venues have proliferated across North America over the last two decades. Evidence indicates that with substantially increased opportunities to gamble, more and more people are availing themselves of these opportunities. In Ontario, for example, between 1992 and 1998 the average annual spending of individual gamblers rose more than 300 percent (Marshall 2000). Concurrent with this increase in gambling activity has been an increase in the incidence of problem gambling over the last twenty years (Shaer et al. 1999). While research into the factors underlying problem gambling remains relatively limited, and tends to focus on the psychology of individual problem gamblers within the framework of a medical model, there are indications that problem gambling is also a function of social context and peer-related behavior. As dierent groups are attracted to dierent types of gambling, so too it seems that problem
gambling varies from one group to another. One dimension on which such dierences have been observed is gender.
