Elaina Bozzuto never considered herself a shopper. She rarely went into department stores. Then she downloaded the Amazon app, and began buying so many discounted items she forgot what she’d purchased until it arrived on her doorstep.
Something similar happened with gambling.
Bozzuto rarely visited casinos near her Connecticut home. But then she downloaded the DraftKings app on her smartphone after seeing a commercial. She wasn’t a sports fan or interested in betting on sports. The attraction was its slots. She quickly became hooked on the adrenaline of betting any time of day or night, even when caring for her newborn.
In one month, she won more than $30,000. But she’d plow the winnings back into the slots. She spent money that her husband gave her to pay bills or to shop for groceries. She gambled money she was supposed to use to operate her resale shop. After losing as much as $200,000 within three years and unable to pay her bills, she filed for personal bankruptcy in 2025, listing some 50 collectors, including DraftKings, as creditors.
“It was so out of control,” said Bozzuto, 30, of Wallingford, Conn., who added that several female friends and family members have also struggled with the online betting websites. ”I knew that I was messing up. But I couldn’t stop it. It ruined my business and my mentality. It really wrecked my life.”
As various court cases across the US have centered around social media addiction, particularly among teens, there’s been less attention paid to the growing number of women using and becoming addicted to online sports betting. Last year, 35% of online sports gamblers were women, compared to 26% in 2022, according to the American Gaming Association. A spokeswoman for the organization declined to comment beyond providing the data.
Of Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings made in the past 12 months that listed various sporting betting websites such as FanDuel, DraftKings or BetMGM as creditors, nearly a quarter came from women, according to a Bloomberg Law review.
Jody Bechtold, CEO of the Better Institute, has been counseling gambling addicts for 20 years. Prior to the Supreme Court legalizing online gambling in 2018, women made up about 40% of her clientele at her clinics. Now, she said, they make up about 90%.
“This is not new to any of us. It’s just been hidden,” Bechtold said. “Our job now is to break the stereotype that this is just a male issue and remove the stigma for those women who feel like they are battling this addiction on their own.”
Women and Sports
One main driver for women who find themselves addicted to online gambling is the drive for competition, fueled partly by the increasing number of women who began playing sports at early ages, gambling experts say.
“The media has focused so much on the young male sports better, never paid attention to younger women sports betting all along,” Bechtold said.
There is also a growing segment of women who began betting on sports as an activity with their romantic partners. They sit at games or in front of the TV with their partners and bet alongside them, then often again after the game is over, said Elizabeth Thielen, senior director of Nicasa, a behavior science service organization in Illinois.
“Women are betting on who is going to catch the ball next. Who is attending the game. What color is the sports drink. These makes it easier for people without sports knowledge to get involved in the game,” said Kitty Martz, executive director of Voices of Problem Gambling Recovery in Oregon.
Sports app betting can become dangerous if it’s done without a strategy or without disposable income with, said Monae Thompson, 34, a sports enthusiast who follows sports teams—especially the Philadelphia 76ers—closely and who has been betting on the apps for the past eight years.
Thompson developed her strategy via other female sports betters in women-owned and operated sites such as BettingLadies.com. She avoids wagering on which team will win. Instead, she bets on individual players’ performances. In basketball, that may mean how many points, rebounds or assists a player gets, or in football, how many yards, interceptions or touchdowns.
Thompson said many sites, such as FanDuel, allow users to set up deposit limits so she can control how much she spends.
“You are going to lose. But if you can’t afford it, then you shouldn’t be betting at all. You can make a little extra money when needed. But if you feel you have to borrow or take dedicated money for bills or other necessities to bet, then you shouldn’t be playing,” she said.
FanDuel and DraftKings didn’t respond to requests for comment. But several of the sites, online gaming experts say, offer various guardrails such as time and deposit limits, providing counseling contact information and self-exclusion lists that are shared among betting sites.
Life Changes
Melanie Watkiss got lost in online gambling while struggling to care for her two children who are neurodivergent. Last summer, she started gambling on a website that provided her “free” game money that she would win and could reuse to play other games. Then, she said, she graduated and began using her own money.
She started out spending about $5. By November, she was spending more than $1,000 a day.
She tried to put up guardrails. She put restrictions on her phone, but then to get around them, accessed the gambling sites from her daughter’s iPad. She was making huge withdrawals from her two separate bank accounts—neither of which, she said, reached out to her regarding the constant withdrawals.
In January, Watkiss’s mother became ill and was hospitalized. Watkiss, a nurse herself, would visit her favorite gambling sites in the hospital. While driving back and forth, she’d pull over to the side of the road to gamble on her smartphone.
“As my mom got sicker, I was gambling more. It felt like a dopamine rush or a hit,” Watkiss, 38, said. “I was gambling to change the way I was feeling.”
On the day her mother died, Watkiss made 45 cash withdrawals totaling about $7,000. She gambled, she said, to cope with her mother’s final moments.
“It was never about the money,” Watkiss, of the UK, said. “Yes, I would win money. But it was the euphoria that I felt. It was the best thing ever. Then it was like 5 or 10 minutes later, I was back on it again. It was a constant loop. Absolutely devastating.”
Watkiss said she reached out to a gambling anonymous group in London and was linked with a male sponsor. She said the two of them clashed repeatedly. She wished her sponsor was a woman.
“There was no empathy with this man. I tried to tell him that what was haunting me was more than the money. It was psychological as well,” Watkiss said. “And when I tried to talk to him about it, he constantly told me to stop going over the same thing and move on. I can’t fully express to him just how he has made me feel. I shut down immediately.”
Thielen, of Nicasa, described women who are battling online gambling as “invisible” because most studies only focus on young men ages 18 to 39 as addicts.
“When people talk about gambling, they tend to think of men,” she said. “Because of the stigma, because of guilt, because most gambling groups are made up of men, women often never acknowledge they have a gambling problem, so they suffer. Alone.”
Cait Huble, director of public affairs at the National Council on Problem Gambling, objected to any correlation between increased participation in online gambling and increased levels of addiction, saying the majority of women gamble responsibly.
“There has been an increase in women engaging with smart phones. And the way women are being marketed to by these online gambling sites has changed, more inclusive. But increased participation does not automatically mean increased harm,” she said. “It doesn’t mean they will develop a problem.”
But as participation among women increases, Huble said, so should warnings and protections and other safety nets. She said there is growing interest among lawmakers to use portions of funds raised through federal sports excise tax to fund educational and gambling addiction programs. In March, in what was billed as the first bipartisan legislation aimed at gambling addiction, Reps. Erin Houchin (R-Ind.) and Andrea Salinas (D-Ore.) introduced Providing Opportunities for Individuals in Need of Treatment and Support Act (H.R. 7875), which would redirect a portion of the federal excise tax on sports wagers to create a funding pool for gambling addiction prevention, treatment, and recovery.
“As a field we can do a better job making those responsible gambling tools a more integrated part of the process, the same the auto industry made seat belts and airbags in your car. You don’t want until an accident happens to have those tools available,” Huble said.
Broke Girl Society
Christina Cook started “The Broke Girl Society” podcast in 2021. The idea was part of her own gambling addiction recovery after attending gambler anonymous groups that were led by and made of men, feeling that no one in the group understood how the impact of the addiction affected women differently than it did men. Today, Cook has more than 300,000 listeners in 70 countries, with new shows twice a month.
Women who tune into her podcasts, Cook said, are often at two extreme ends of life: new mothers and women going through various stages of menopause.
“The amount of younger women who are showing up who are postpartum has been overwhelming. These women just had babies, they are sleep deprived, up late at night feeding their baby and gambling is one thing that makes them feel better for short period of time,” Cook said.
“Then there are women who are going through a change in life, even with their hormones or their children are adults and moved out and they have been diagnosed as being depressed and they are looking for quick entertainment in online gambling, which fills a void and then grows into something harmful,” she said.
Martz, of Voices of Problem Gambling Recovery, has worked with women struggling with addiction for 16 years.
“The hormonal relationship to gambling has been so under researched,” she said. “Women are looking for an escape when they are up at 2 a.m. nursing an infant or struggling with new, sudden changes in their life.”
Bozzuto started gambling when she was struggling with depression, she said, after the birth of her first son. Now, holding her second son, a 9-month old, Bozzuto said she was able to emerge from bankruptcy after three months and no longer gambles. “Life with an infant can be mundane and stressful. This was an outlet,” she said. “It was that instant gratification.”
The challenges are global, Cook added. “This is an issue throughout the world. Not just for the US.”
There are several groups dedicated to helping women with online gambling addiction, including gamblers anonymous https://gamblersanonymous.org, https://thebrokegirlsociety.com or for women who are seeking to interact with other online, female sports gamblers, https:///bettingladies.com.