The All-In Diversity Project, supported by the Centre for Diversity, Policy, Research and Practice at Oxford Brookes University, has published its first ‘All-Index,’ establishing employee demographics and employment practices around the world, within the industry.

Researching a total of 25 betting and gaming organisations, which between them represent over 100 global brands and have a total of 117,231 employees, the aim is developed a baseline from which attitudes and approach to diversity, equality and inclusion can be measured on a yearly basis.

Kelly Kehn, co-founder of All-In Diversity Project, explained: “The survey covers a number of areas, including employment policies and practices, benefits and proactive strategies supporting equality, diversity and inclusion.

“This is the first initiative on this topic where the sector has collaborated on a global scale, and we are very pleased with the end result.

“Those who have signed up believe in the need for collaboration and  transparency in order to build a more diverse and inclusive workforce for the future.”

The interim report for Q3 2018 represents an overall demographic 53.5 per cent male to 46.5 per cent female of those taking part in the study, with roles within training and development and marketing and advertising seeing an even split across a large proportion of organisations.

The least gender balanced roles relate to technology (all aspects), HR and strategy and risk, whilst there were more women reported than men in the roles of sales and commercial, finance, human resources and people management and legal and compliance.

Those roles reported to be risk related saw an 18 per cent female representation, as opposed to 20 per cent of tech jobs, with the latter above the UK and US national averages of 17 per cent and 19 per cent.

Detailing the industry’s career progression from employee to executive positions, the Index reports a close male/female parity at ‘entry-level’ and up to ‘team leader/supervisor’.

Moving upwards on career progress it shows that at levels above manager status, the sector sees its most significant difference in rate of gender decline between head of department to CEO/MD positions, dropping 90 per cent from 80 men to 8 women.

However, this executive trend is not replicated at a governance level, where current industry board structures show that 28 per cent of corporate non-executives were reported as female – a figure also above US and UK national averages.

“Whilst diversity surveys per se are not new, this to, the best of our knowledge, is the very first initiative which seeks to measure all forms of diversity across a whole sector on a global basis. We know there will be challenges along the way, but by choosing to collaborate and share best practice we hope to drive long-term impactful change in our sector, and in doing so perhaps provide a blueprint for others,” added co-founder Christina Thakor-Rankin.