Defying the odds: horseplayers and female jockeys

ABSTRACT

The effect of a jockey’s sex on both pari-mutuel betting odds and race outcomes is examined for a three-year sample of North American thoroughbred races. The results reveal that for all races in total, a jockey’s sex has no significant impact on the outcome of a race, holding all else constant, including horse quality. However, horseplayers assign a 1.5% higher probability of winning to female jockeys as reflected in their betting behaviour. For the subsample of stakes races, female jockeys are 2% less likely to win, ceteris paribus, but horseplayers do not consider jockey sex to be significant information for these premier races. Thus, the results indicate that horseplayers overestimate the performance of female jockeys in an industry where female jockeys often report significant hurdles to achievement and advancement. We conclude that pari-mutuel betting markets reflect an inefficiency with respect to a jockey’s sex and that additional research is needed to uncover the source of this anomaly.

KEYWORDS:

• Horseracing
• gender
• female jockeys
• pari-mutuel odds
• betting inefficiency

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J16
• L83
• Z20
• G4

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Pawan Kahol, Pittsburg State University, Dean of Graduate Studies, for financial support, to Marshall Gramm for inspiration and advice, and to Marybeth Grimes for editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Additional information about the data and services provided by the Handicapper’s Data Warehouse can be found on their website: http://www.horsedata.com/?q=content/welcome-handicappers-data-warehouse

² Table A1 in Appendix A displays comparative statistics for female and male jockeys.

³ 48,446 observations were thrown out due to missing programme numbers, unidentifiable jockeys, and races with coupled horses.

⁴ Table A2 in Appendix A provides the full set of independent variables and their definitions and Table A3 in Appendix A displays summary statistics for the variables in the models.

⁵ Table A4 in Appendix A displays results for the full specification minus the track dummy variables.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for this project was received from Pittsburg State University’s Graduate School and Kelce College of Business.