Women and Sports Betting: What the Bankruptcies Show

The receipts showed up in bankruptcy court

For years the argument that women's gambling harm was rising ran on clinical anecdote. In June, it got a paper trail.

Bloomberg Law reporter Keith L. Alexander published an investigation on June 22, 2026 that did something simple and overdue: it went to bankruptcy filings. Reviewing Chapter 7 petitions from the prior 12 months that named FanDuel, DraftKings, or BetMGM as creditors, Bloomberg Law found that nearly a quarter were filed by women. Axios Philadelphia independently summarized the same finding in August, describing women as about a quarter of those filings.

That is a different kind of evidence than a survey. A bankruptcy petition is sworn, itemized, and public. Nobody files one to make a point. When a sportsbook shows up on a creditor schedule, the harm has already moved through the household budget, the credit cards, and usually the relationships, and landed in a courthouse.

The Bloomberg Law piece is behind a paywall, which is worth saying plainly. We verified the core bankruptcy finding against Axios Philadelphia's independent reporting of it before using it here.

The profile changed, and so did the product

The same Bloomberg Law analysis cited American Gaming Association figures showing women were 35% of online sports gamblers in 2025, up from 26% in 2022. We were not able to locate that specific breakdown published on the AGA's own site, so treat it as an industry figure reported through Bloomberg Law rather than one we independently pulled from a primary AGA release.

Even discounted, the direction matters. The cultural image of a woman with a gambling problem is a slot machine, a bingo card, or a casual casino app. That image is now years out of date. Josh Ercole, executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania, told Axios that more women contacting the state helpline now report struggling with online slots rather than casino slots, part of the broader migration of gambling onto the phone.

Sports betting is the other half of that migration, and it's the half that got the marketing budget. It arrives through fantasy leagues, group chats, team fandom, and ads inside the games themselves. None of that reads as "gambling" the way a casino floor does. We wrote about why sports betting is built to be addictive and about microbetting, the in-play wagers that resolve in seconds and turn a three-hour game into hundreds of separate decisions.

It is not who you would picture

Two data points from Pennsylvania make the point better than any national average.

First, the helpline. Among women calling Pennsylvania's problem gambling helpline, call volume was highest in the 45 to 54 age band, according to Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania data reported by Axios Philadelphia on August 24, 2026. Not college students. Not retirees at a casino. Women in the middle of their careers and, often, the middle of raising a family.

Second, the caseload. Jennifer Levitt, a Philadelphia-area therapist at ETHOS Treatment who holds the ICGC-II advanced gambling counselor certification, told Axios that women now make up about a third of her clients, up sharply in just a few years, and that they include CEOs, lawyers, and therapists. She also noted that some of her female clients gravitate toward strategy-driven games like poker and blackjack, which cuts against the assumption that women prefer passive play.

The people in that description have money, credentials, and something to lose. They are also, for exactly those reasons, among the least likely to say anything out loud.

One clinic is not a country

You will see a striking statistic circulating from the same Bloomberg Law reporting: that at the Better Institute, a Pennsylvania treatment practice, women went from roughly 40% of gambling addiction clients before the Supreme Court cleared the way for legal sports betting in 2018 to roughly 90% today. Its CEO, Jody Bechtold, put it this way: "This is not new to any of us. It's just been hidden."

That quote is worth sitting with. The number needs a fence around it.

It is one practice's caseload, not a population estimate. Caseload composition moves for reasons that have nothing to do with prevalence: referral relationships, insurance panels, a clinician's reputation for treating women, marketing, telehealth reach. A shift from 40% to 90% inside one clinic tells you something real about who is walking through that door. It does not tell you that 90% of Americans with gambling disorder are women, and anyone repeating it that way is misreading it.

The counterweight is worth quoting too. Cait Huble, director of public affairs at the National Council on Problem Gambling, told Bloomberg Law: "Increased participation does not automatically mean increased harm." She's right, and a recovery site that only prints the alarming half of the record is not being useful.

Here's the honest read. Participation is clearly up. Bankruptcy filings and helpline demographics are real signals that some of that participation has turned into harm. What we do not have is a clean national prevalence study showing exactly how much. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Why bankruptcy is the wrong place to find out

The reason the bankruptcy data is so useful for journalism is exactly why it's so useless for a person still in it. By the time a sportsbook lands on a creditor schedule, years have usually passed.

The clinical progression runs the other direction. Gambling disorder (DSM-5 312.31, ICD-10 F63.0) is diagnosed on behavior, not on a dollar figure. The criteria that show up first tend to be preoccupation, escalating stakes to feel the same charge, repeated failed attempts to cut back, lying to conceal the extent of it, and chasing losses, which is the single most reliable early tell. Money is a lagging indicator of all of them.

There's a specific trap for a competent, high-earning woman here. If you have the income to absorb the first year of losses, the financial alarm never goes off, and the behavioral escalation runs unchecked in the meantime. Bankruptcy is not the beginning of a gambling problem. It's what happens when a gambling problem outruns a good salary.

For families, this is why the signs to watch for are behavioral. Secrecy about the phone. Bets placed during work hours. Money that was earmarked for something specific quietly redirected. A person who used to sleep and now doesn't. And it's why we've argued that a spreadsheet does not fix gambling debt: as long as the betting continues, no repayment plan survives it. The behavior stops first, then the money gets rebuilt.

What the treatment research actually says

There's a new piece of evidence that should change how women are treated, and it's not a news story, it's a review.

In 2026, Monreal-Bartolomé and colleagues published a systematic review in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions covering interventions and prevention approaches for women with gambling disorder. They screened PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science through September 2025 and found only 18 studies that reported female-specific outcomes: five on prevention, thirteen on treatment.

Two findings matter for anyone choosing care.

CBT-based treatment works for women. The treatment studies, mostly cognitive behavioral therapy, reduced gambling severity and psychological distress. That is not a small thing to be able to say.

But dropout and relapse were higher among women with more psychiatric comorbidity or thinner social support. And the authors concluded that standard interventions "insufficiently address their unique needs," with no study in the prevention literature systematically applying a gender-sensitive framework or breaking results out by sex.

Translated: the treatment that exists helps, and it was mostly designed and validated on men. If you're a woman starting treatment, the two things the research says will most determine whether you stay in it are whether your co-occurring depression or anxiety is being treated alongside the gambling, and whether you have actual people around you. Those are not soft extras. They're the documented predictors of dropout.

The legal picture, stated carefully

In Philadelphia, the Public Health Advocacy Institute filed Sage and Thompson v. DraftKings, Inc., et al. in the Court of Common Pleas in March 2026, alleging that major sportsbook apps were engineered to maximize addiction. The defendants filed preliminary objections on July 15, 2026, arguing among other things that Pennsylvania's consumer protection statute doesn't apply and that the claims are time-barred.

No court has ruled on any of it. Both plaintiffs are men, so the case is not itself a women's-harm case. It matters here only because the design practices it describes, push notifications, in-play prompts, and VIP host outreach, are the same mechanics reaching everyone with the app installed, and they don't check your gender before they fire.

What to actually do this week

If the last three sections landed somewhere personal, here's the short version.

Run the screen. Ten minutes, honest answers, no login. Am I addicted to gambling? walks the DSM-5 criteria in plain language. A screen is not a diagnosis, and it is a much better use of an anxious hour than checking your balance again.

Cut access before you cut back. Willpower is a terrible security system. Delete the apps, and then put a real barrier behind the deletion: device and network-level blocking, plus self-exclusion where your state offers it. If sports betting specifically is the problem, our guide to stopping covers what changes when the whole season is a trigger.

Tell one person. The shame around women's gambling is heavier and better documented than most people realize, and it's the reason women arrive at help later and sicker. We covered that in depth here. One person who knows is the difference between a hard week and a hidden year. That can be a therapist, a peer, or a room: Gamblers Anonymous meetings are free and running everywhere, including online.

Treat the thing underneath. The review evidence is clear that gambling treatment for women goes better when co-occurring depression and anxiety get treated too. If you're only addressing the betting, you're addressing half of it.

Abstinence is the goal here, and we'll say why without hedging: there is no verified daily amount, day of the week, or bet size that makes an addicted brain safe. The research on cutting back in this population is not encouraging, and the products are specifically built to make moderation fail.

You are not the demographic anybody warned. That's exactly the problem, and it is not a character flaw. Start a plan with Cope Compass, and if things are urgent right now, go here first.

Sources

• Bloomberg Law: The Hidden Faces of America's Online Gambling Addiction: Women. Keith L. Alexander, June 22, 2026. Primary source for the Chapter 7 bankruptcy review (nearly a quarter of filings naming FanDuel, DraftKings, or BetMGM as creditors were filed by women), the American Gaming Association participation figures (35% in 2025 vs 26% in 2022), the Better Institute caseload figures, and the Bechtold and Huble quotes. Paywalled.
• Axios Philadelphia: More Pennsylvania women are seeking help for gambling addiction. August 24, 2026. Supports the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania helpline data (women callers highest at ages 45-54), Josh Ercole's comments on the shift to online slots, Jennifer Levitt's caseload composition, and independent confirmation of the Bloomberg Law bankruptcy finding.
• Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania. Confirms the organization is a 501(c)(3) affiliated with the National Council on Problem Gambling and that Josh Ercole is its executive director.
• ETHOS Treatment: Jennifer Levitt, MA, LPC, ICGC-II, CAADC. Confirms Levitt's credentials, gambling disorder specialization, and Pennsylvania practice.
• Monreal-Bartolomé, A., Cabrera-Gil, I., Royuela-Colomer, E., et al. (2026). Gambling in women: A systematic review of interventions and prevention approaches. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 15(1), 135-156.. Supports the 18-study evidence base (5 prevention, 13 treatment), the CBT effectiveness finding, the elevated dropout and relapse among women with greater psychopathology or limited support, and the conclusion that standard interventions insufficiently address women's needs. Open record via the Irish national drugs library.
• Public Health Advocacy Institute: landmark sports gambling lawsuit announcement. March 2026 filing of Sage and Thompson v. DraftKings, Inc., et al. in the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer: FanDuel and DraftKings seek dismissal. July 28, 2026. Supports the July 15 preliminary objections and the defendants' arguments. Paywalled.
• Siena College Research Institute: online sports betting poll. fielded February 16-27, 2026, n=3,084. Background on rising risk indicators among account holders.
• American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5. Gambling Disorder, code 312.31. ICD-10 code F63.0.
• National Council on Problem Gambling. Organizational context for state affiliate councils and problem gambling helpline services.