During the SBC Summit Lisbon, SBC launched its Women’s Empowerment Initiative (WEI), with the aim of creating a community for women in gaming.

And on the latest episode of iGaming Daily Jessica Welman, Editor of SBC Americas, was joined by Lucía Mouriño, SBC’s VP of Relationships – LatAm, to discuss the new initiative and its plans for the future.

Lu explained that the idea for the WEI came about during SBC Summit Rio as a way to bring together different organisations that were already advocating for women in gaming and also spoke about how she expects the WEI to develop over time.

She said: “There are a few associations that focus on empowering women. However, we were talking about how there’s not a single event that reunites all these associations and we thought, why not do it ourselves? Now we have the support of 10 associations and they just launched one on-stage.

“Lisbon is our global event so we want to have everyone here, however, in the following events, because we have regional events, the other [regional] associations can take over there.

“It’s a work in progress and we are welcoming to any comments, opinions and feedback that you might have so we can make it better for everyone.”

Lu finished by emphasising that involvement in the WEI is not limited to just women, and men are also encouraged to engage with the movement as “if we empower women, we are actually empowering everyone”.

As well as the WEI, the duo also recapped some of the panel sessions that they attended and moderated while at the summit. 

Jess noted that a theme present throughout the panels she was a part of was the rise of social media influencers in marketing and the challenges that this can pose for operators and regulators alike.

She said: “My big message from all of the panels was influencers are increasingly a part of this and they’re amazing and useful but they also are potentially very, very dangerous because the internet moves so you have something go wrong and it’s very hard to come back from it.

“At least in the US and Canada, there’s so much focus on television advertising and nobody’s really shining a light on the fact that operators are posting their own content dozens of times a day and they’re trying to generate engagement and you’ve got influencers promoting brands.

“I feel like being on social media, I’m certainly getting more inundated with sports betting in a way that feels intrusive.”