It’s Not Gambling, It’s ‘Girl Math’

“Come get ready with me for the day,” a young blond woman says over footage of herself making her bed, arranging her pillows, and weighing her clothing choices. The video is just like any other lifestyle content that influencers post to Instagram and TikTok—right up until she whips out her phone and scrolls through the Kalshi app. “I use it to check the weather to help me pick out an outfit for the day,” she says, modeling a black spandex romper for the camera. “Go ahead and check out the app link below.”

Recently, my Instagram feed has been haunted by women explaining how much they enjoy betting on elections, the pop-music charts, and Dancing With the Stars. They are advertising prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which let users wager on virtually anything. “The boys can do their parlays and use words I’ve never heard of. But the girls can use their pop culture and educated guesses to make decisions and trade on Kalshi,” a woman says in a TikTok on one of the company’s accounts. Her caption assures me: “Kalshi is for the girls!!!!”

So far though, it is not. Prediction markets have a dude problem. Though these sites offer all sorts of wagers—where will Taylor Swift get married? Who will win Survivor?—they have largely become yet another place for men to bet on football and March Madness. In the past six months, 88 percent of trades on Kalshi have been about sports, according to the investment firm Paradigm. The second-largest category, at about 6 percent, is crypto (which is arguably even more bro-ey).

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In an apparent attempt to bridge the gap, both Polymarket and Kalshi are running social-media campaigns that parrot the language of female empowerment and girlish memes. “Girl math says if I make $10 predicting real-life stuff, that coffee was technically free,” a girl in thick-framed glasses says in an ad that Kalshi ran on Facebook and Instagram. “If I’m already scrolling news or pop culture anyway, might as well turn my hot takes into some free iced coffees.” She adds, “It’s kind of addicting, but in a fun way.” (The video has since been removed for not having a necessary ad disclosure.) Some posts, like this one, are advertisements from the companies themselves; some are paid influencer partnerships; and some are either undisclosed partnerships or made by women who are just super excited to post a suspicious amount of links to Polymarket.

Prediction markets should be an easier sell for women than traditional sports betting. Though women are less likely to gamble than men, prediction markets offer the veneer of being more than places to bet. Both Kalshi and Polymarket claim that they are financial markets, not casinos; users make trades about any given event, which in turn generate odds that supposedly predict the outcome. (They are called “prediction markets” for a reason.)

When prediction markets try to entice women, they especially tend to lean into the idea that all of this is investing, not gambling. On Kalshi’s dedicated Instagram for women, @KalshiGirls, one meme reads, “When someone says prediction markets are ‘just betting,’” over a photograph of Cher from Clueless saying, “Ugh, as if.” Meanwhile, the ads for men tend to emphasize the fun of gambling and the possibly big payouts: “Dude,” reads an ad Kalshi ran in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, “I am going to bet my Cybertruck on Trump, probably gonna make enough for a house if he wins.”

Kalshi in particular has been ramping up its efforts with women. (Polymarket’s main site, where people bet using crypto, is accessible in the United States only through digital work-arounds.) The reason for appealing to women is simple, Elisabeth Diana, Kalshi’s head of communications, told me: “They’re 50 percent of the population.” She noted that 26 percent of Kalshi-account holders are female—up from 13 percent just 10 months ago. Diana claimed that much of that increase is because of organic interest, but the company seems intent on pulling in more women. Before ABC canceled Season 22 of The Bachelorette a couple of weeks ago, Kalshi had been planning a watch party.

Sure enough, when I looked up all the ads that Kalshi has run on Instagram and Facebook, I spotted a fair number that were obviously geared toward women. In the clips, influencers tended to make small wagers with a clear goal in mind—usually caffeinated beverages. Polymarket taps into the same dynamic on its X account for female traders, @PolyBaddies. (I do not suggest you Google that phrase.) One post includes a photo of a Starbucks cup with the caption, “Matcha and markets kinda day ????.” (Polymarket did not respond to requests for comment.)

Many of these marketing efforts are ridiculous. I would bet—sorry—that most women will not be compelled to spend their time on prediction markets to maybe win $5 for their morning matcha. But some ads are less “girl math” and more actual math. Priya Kamdar, Maya Shah, and Anika Mirza—the 20-something hosts of Get the Check, a technology-and-business podcast—reached out to Kalshi directly to obtain a partnership deal because they were already using the site, the three hosts told me. Mirza has a Kalshi wager on the race to succeed Nancy Pelosi in Congress; Shah bet on how long the government shutdown was going to last; Kamdar put money on the Rotten Tomatoes score that each movie in the Wicked franchise would receive (she was right about the first film and wrong about the second).

[Read: America is slow-walking into a Polymarket disaster]

The more women who are betting on prediction markets, the closer these sites get to their stated goal of forecasting the future. If they want to predict the Fed’s next interest rate, the winner of The Bachelor, or whether or not it will rain tomorrow in Poughkeepsie, a market made up only of male sports fans won’t cut it. But Kalshi and Polymarket also have other incentives to show they are for women. Sports have an outsize popularity on prediction markets because these sites allow people to effectively wager even in states where sports betting is illegal. This is becoming a major problem for the companies. Kalshi is facing lawsuits from several states for allegedly operating as an unregistered sports-betting site. Arizona recently became the first state to press criminal charges against Kalshi, and Nevada has temporarily blocked Kalshi and Polymarket from operating in the state. The companies, which maintain that they are financial markets and thus not subject to sports-betting restrictions, have a vested interest in getting users betting on topics besides sports. “It does future-proof them,” Dustin Gouker, a gambling-industry consultant who writes a daily newsletter, told me.

Perhaps the biggest concern with these ads is that they make it easy to forget that you can actually lose money on prediction markets. Shah, the podcast host, told me that if someone trades on topics they’re deeply knowledgeable about, prediction markets can be a useful “financial tool.” But they’re inherently risky. At one point, I was served an ad of a woman anxiously checking a Kalshi bet with her friends, with the caption, “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions. It’s amazing! ????????” When I searched for it again, the ad had been taken down; the next time I saw it was as an exhibit in a class-action lawsuit against Kalshi that alleges, in part, that the site is not adequately disclosing risks to consumers. (Kalshi has denied the allegations.)

To hear the companies tell it, prediction markets are just another way to be a #girlboss. “Listen up, girlie pops! This platform is normally considered, like, for the finance bros, but I’m gonna show you why it’s so for us,” one woman says in a post seemingly sponsored by Polymarket. (The video includes no disclosures.) Kalshi and Polymarket become just another part of the day—platforms that women can use to check the odds even if they don’t place bets.

A year ago, I probably could not have told you what a prediction market was. By January, Polymarket odds were displayed during the Golden Globes, and CNN pundits were citing Kalshi’s markets on air. In February, Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard—a legendary street in my hometown, known for its clubs and neon signs—had a billboard displaying live Kalshi odds. These platforms are already ubiquitous. If women really do start using them en masse, prediction markets will burrow into American life even more deeply. Until then, the companies will keep reminding them to do some “girl math.”