- With the enduring gender pay gap, the deck is stacked against women in business.
- Poker Power teaches women to play the game to build confidence and negotiation skills.
- Power Poker now works with 240 companies, including Morgan Stanley and Comcast.
When it comes to the gender pay gap, the deck is stacked against women, who make just over 80 cents for every dollar made by men.
But some are taking the hand they’re dealt and turning it into a win regardless of the odds. Poker Power, a woman-founded company, aims to empower women with confidence and risk-taking skills by teaching them to play poker.
“What I’ve learned over more than 25 years in business is the biggest thing between where women are today and where they want to be requires taking a risk. Specifically taking risks around money,” Jenny Just, Poker Power’s founder, said at a women’s entrepreneurship summit in November.
The idea for the company came in late 2019, Just said, as she and her husband tried to teach their teenage daughter about reading her opponent on the tennis court. They struggled to teach her to consider her rival, not just the game, and thought learning poker might help. To experiment, Just gathered a group of 10 women and girls for a few lessons.
“From the first lesson to the fourth lesson, there literally was a metamorphosis. The girls at the beginning were whispering, talking to their friends about what they should do. If someone lost their chips, they said, ‘Oh, you can have my chips,'” Just recalled. “By the fourth lesson, the girls were sitting up straight. Nobody was going to look at their cards, and definitely nobody was getting ahold of their chips. The confidence in the room was palpable.”
So she turned that revelation into a company that now aims to empower one million women and girls “to win, on and off the table.”
“The poker table was like every money table I had sat at,” Just said. “It was an opportunity to learn skills. Skills like capital allocation, taking risks, and learning how to strategize.”
Erin Lydon, who Just recruited to be the president of Poker Power, told Business Insider she initially thought the idea was crazy, if not a little stupid.
“I said it because I had been surrounded by poker. On Wall Street, there’s always a game going on. It’s always a bunch of bros,” Lydon told BI. “I didn’t feel like I could break in, but I also didn’t want to. It didn’t feel like a space I could inhabit.”
Once Lydon saw the strategy behind the game — and how it related to women at work — she was in. They launched Poker Power at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. They leaned on their contacts in the finance world, and now their primary revenue comes from working B2B with finance, law, and tech organizations.
“I talked to a lot of CEOs of a lot of the investment banks who played poker. I’m not joking; it would take me 30 seconds to get them to nod their head and say, ‘This is fantastic,'” Lydon said.
Though just a few years old, Poker Power is already in 40 countries and has worked with 230 companies, including Comcast, Morgan Stanley, and Morningstar.
Poker Power’s students compete on leaderboards and play for bragging rights. When someone wins a game and collects their chips, the other women at the table celebrate and support the winner, Lydon said.
“You will never see that in Vegas. You won’t see that in a home game with a bunch of guys. You see it at our table,” Lydon said. “It’s not that I care if you ever get into the casino. I really don’t. It’s not the purpose. The purpose is: Can we change how you think and strategize and negotiate like a winning poker player?”
She emphasizes, however, that it’s still a competition.
“We want women to feel like something is at risk, and they have to make a decision. They may win. They may lose. They’re going to learn from that experience,” Lydon said. “And they are going to do it repetitively, so it starts to feel less uncomfortable to take those risks — at the poker table, asking for the raise, asking for the promotion, getting your husband to take the garbage out.”
Individuals can sign up for four 60-minute classes for $50 — a price Lydon said is intentionally low to help the experience remain accessible for all. They charge a higher rate for organizations, which allows them to bring the game to universities and high schools across the globe. Poker Power has taught multiple cohorts of high schoolers in Kenya.
“There’s this photograph of the girls sitting at the poker table, and they look so proud. Ringed behind them are all the village elders, and it’s this power dynamic. It’s really a power shift that you see in this photo when you recognize what these girls have accomplished,” Lydon said. “And poker is part of that.”