6 Reasons Why There Are Not Enough Women in Crypto

Shortly after joining BanklessDAO, I became a talent scout for the Writers Guild. I spoke with hundreds of people interested in joining the guild, and I could count the number of women on one hand.

BanklessDAO technically has thousands of people, maybe 500 active contributors and a dozen women. This is not because BanklessDAO is unfriendly to women — quite the opposite, BanklessDAO is very welcoming.

Crypto as a whole has this problem, our space strives to be inclusive to everyone - I believe it can be, and I believe the principles of this new internet of ownership will actually make the world a better place and open doors for those who don’t yet have a seat at the table.

So why aren’t women joining the crypto community? Here are my six reasons.

Cryptocurrency often starts as a side hustle

Many people start crypto as a hobby. If they have the time, it might even turn into a side hustle — contributing a few hours a week to The DAO, yield farming, or flipping NFTs, all done after get off work, in the evenings, and on weekends.

This side hustle culture may appeal more to men than women, as women of all generations are still primarily responsible for childcare, housework, grocery shopping and meal preparation. Married women with children spend nearly twice as much time on cleaning, childcare and housework as their husbands.

No matter how much progress has been made toward making women more equal in the workforce, they’ve missed out on equality in the neglected but essential realms of the kitchen, living room, laundry room, and grocery store.

It was so strange to me, wasn't my generation the progressive, world-changing generation? Weren't we leaving behind those old gender norms? But even for young couples, there was still this massive post-work imbalance in their homes. The more I looked into this, the more I felt that for many women, especially those with children, having a black box operation was not an option.

In the Side Hustle data, 46% of employed men reported engaging in side hustles, compared to 35% of employed women. And men make far more money on their side hustles. The average monthly salary for men is $2,708, while the average monthly salary for women is just $526. Side hustles are not only more feasible for men who aren’t doing housework. They’re also ultimately more profitable, for a number of possible reasons.

“Unless Americans turn their attention to the home, where gender inequality remains fiercely protected by old-fashioned social norms, their understanding of the problem and their solutions will be incomplete,” Aliya Hamid Rao wrote in The Atlantic. In other words, we won’t get women into Web3 if we don’t get honest about what’s happening at home.

Crypto can bring women into the fold. We just need to find viable ways for women to work in crypto full-time, rather than doing it as a side job. By creating full-time, paid roles for individuals who are either outside of crypto or have one foot in the crypto room but haven’t completely fallen into the labisole hole, we will create more opportunities for women to join the crypto front lines.

Camilla Russo, author of The Infinite Machine and founder of media company The Defiant, has been one of my biggest inspirations in my crypto journey thus far.

Crypto is portrayed as the next generation of tech bros

The media is obsessed with one type of knowledge worker.

Male, white, late 20s, has a high tech job, wears a quarter zip Patagonia fleece vest in all likelihood, needs a haircut, is an introvert, qualifies for Mensa, and has a socially awkward quirk that creates something that makes him forever rich. Lacks life experience, is callous, and people laugh at them. If they were generous, they'd give the money away or something (a tech bro trait).

The problem isn't that these people exist -- many of them do a great job. The problem is that when this story is played over and over again, it can feel like there's no room for women.

The story became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the "tech bro" became such an enduring trope that people couldn't imagine life without him around, creating cool new startups that would squander money for years before getting acquired by the FAANGs. They even started wearing those zip-up sweatshirts to look like a tech bro, and Crypto fit the bill perfectly.

If crypto is portrayed as the new Silicon Valley, then crypto bros are portrayed as the new tech bros. Crypto bros may have some similarities to tech bros (I’m sure they both need a haircut), but the spirit is still the same.

When this narrative persists, it keeps girls and women out of the game. Not everyone wants to go around breaking glass ceilings and ignoring gender norms. It gets tiring. The media’s “tech bros turned crypto bros” narrative is creating barriers for women to enter crypto. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — VCs see people who look and talk like them, and then they decide to fund them. Then more people who look and talk like the originals end up entering the space, and it keeps spiraling.

But there can be room for women in this narrative, and we don’t need to build an industry for crypto bros. In fact, try this, stop using the term “crypto bro” right now. We can destroy the old boys club culture of tech and hire women outside of crypto who haven’t made the leap yet. By hiring women who may have soft skills like art, communication, writing, and project management to work full-time, we will break the tech bro narrative and turn it upside down.

Cryptocurrency is for risk-takers, women are not encouraged to take risks

Studies show that women are more risk-averse than men. And crypto, as we all know from the rollercoaster ride of ups and downs it experiences every week (and some regulatory uncertainty that keeps you up at night), is pretty risky. But do women really feel like they can’t hold some blue-chip tokens to hedge their bets?

“In general, I’ve always felt like crypto was also a male thing because my first approach was through stroking, not trading,” he said. (Ornella is one of the core members of Bankless DAO and contributes to international media nodes and marketing.) “It’s a very, very rare thing to see women in the space.”

While it’s true that women participate in fewer high-risk activities than men, including skiing, rock climbing, and free diving, I think the problem goes deeper than simple risk aversion. One study found that despite women being underrepresented in high-risk sports like cliff diving and free diving, women who participated in these sports did not exhibit any thrill-seeking behavior, which is a form of risk taking. In other words, women who participate in these sports are just as risk-tolerant as men, and there must be other factors at play.

One possible explanation is our socialization, from a very young age, females are socialized not to take risks while males are encouraged to do daring things . As a child, I was in Girl Scouts and my brother was in Boy Scouts. We Girl Scouts had a rule that we weren’t even allowed to run on the sidewalks when they went into the woods and threw knives at tree stumps. We sat inside, filling out exercise books while the boys went rock climbing and camping for weeks. The socialization of taking risks runs deeper. Girls watched movies and read stories about princesses trapped in castles, patiently waiting for the brave, adventurous knight who would go through all the conquests and come to rescue them. Many of our modern stories don’t follow the same trope, but they still draw inspiration from it.

So we know that some women may be more risk averse than some men. But I think socialization and societal expectations of women contribute to risk aversion more than anything else.

While it’s difficult to change society’s expectations and demands, it’s easier to make changes on a smaller scale. Rewarding men and women for taking risks, and then encouraging them to take healthier risks, is a good first step.

Web3 thought leader and Variant Fund co-founder Jin Li has also been a huge inspiration to me, especially through writing.

Crypto requires hard skills, like computer science and finance

The two main industries that lead directly into crypto: 1) finance and 2) computer science, are both male-dominated. According to a Preqin report on venture capital firms, women make up only 17.9% of employees and 9.9% of senior positions. And college graduates in hard sciences like physics, engineering, and computer science still outnumber men by 4:1.

They are mostly male for a number of reasons—historically men have been pushed into math, finance, and the natural sciences. Boys are socialized at a young age to experiment with science- and math-oriented toys, like Legos. Gender norms, like who is the “breadwinner” in the family, are harder to erase than we think.

But encryption goes far beyond these difficult skills and is just not well understood.

In Bankless DAO, all core contributors have a toolkit of soft skills at their disposal. They are communicators, writers, thinkers, artists, and readers. They are not sole number crunchers, nor are they so deep in coding that they don't surface for fresh air. They are much more multidimensional than that.

Crypto is attracting more people with soft skills whose backgrounds aren’t VCs or Silicon Valley tech startups. Just look at the explosion of artists coming in through NFTs, or writers coming in to own their work through platforms like Mirror. We need to continue to actively work to change the narrative that crypto is only for people who care about finance and computer science, it’s much more than that.

Chase Chapman hosts my favorite Web3 podcast: On the Other Side, I love that she highlights diverse voices and brings a unique positive-sum perspective to the table.

Cryptocurrency is for people who only talk about money

Bankless touts cryptocurrency as an incredible wealth-building opportunity, which is exciting and people are making a lot of money. But compared to men, women shy away from talking about money, especially about the moonshots that make cryptocurrency so attractive to so many people.

I never talk about money with my female friends, and unless we're arguing with each other over dinner or complaining about paying the rent, it's not what we talk about. We also never talk about getting money - we might talk about something we hope to have, but never about how we plan to get it. I know a lot of women have similar experiences, and it spans generations. For example, I've never heard my mom talk about money with her friends, but I often hear my dad and his friends talk about stocks.

Part of this may be because women are portrayed in the media as overspending and shopaholics. High school girls with “Dad’s credit card” are ostracized. Rich and powerful women are accused of having gotten there by “sleeping their way to the top.” Rich women are not the same as rich men, and our culture suggests otherwise.

Women not talking about money may be because of how they are treated when they have money, and the old adage that men are the breadwinners may also prevent women from talking about it.

So, how do we solve this problem in encryption?

We're not just talking about cryptocurrencies for money, but we're also creating safe, healthy spaces for women to talk about money without feeling like they'll be judged. We're normalizing it for women to talk about money, ask for a raise, and climb the economic ladder. An open, free crypto space means we can create a lot of those norms right now.

Simona Pop is an Ethereum thought leader, contributor to Gitcoin and Status, and founder of Bounties Network. Simona Pop excels at providing a magnified perspective on the future we are building in crypto.

Crypto is an unfriendly space

Now that I understand crypto better, I know that anonymity is not nameless so they can hide from the past (unless you're Sifu). Rather, they are nameless so they can create a new identity that allows them to better fit into this new reality we're building. I support this wholeheartedly - it makes crypto better because people can get comfortable in their own skin and new identities.

But when I stand outside of Crypto and look at this anonymous dominated space, I am a little concerned. Anonymous spaces have historically been hostile to women. Forums on platforms like Reddit and FourChan that are dominated by women are not places that women frequent. I am sure you have heard about movements like this. Unfortunately, anonymity is one of the main tools that keeps these movements going.

When I first joined a DAO and saw the sea of ​​Reddit lookalike names and avatar profile pictures, I took a step back and thought about what I was doing. Was I supposed to be here? I was curious. I knew they were mostly male - the voices on the phone told you that - and I wondered if this would be a welcoming space. But as soon as I started joining calls, I knew this was an Anonymous space unlike any other. It was a welcoming, friendly, and warm space, not cold and hostile like the cautionary tales I'd read before.

Crypto has a marketing problem, it doesn’t know how to build the vibe of the space in a way that doesn’t feel chatroom- and Reddit-Forum-y.

Going to the point of professionalization, essentially KYC, will that mean we’ll get more women involved? Maybe, and maybe not. I’ve noticed that women use their “real” names and “real” pictures more than men on Discord and Twitter. But taking away the rich culture of anonymity would mean we lose a big part of crypto.

I think we just need more women to understand that this Anonymous space is not like what we’ve all heard about and what we’ve all stayed away from. It’s an open, warm space that’s inclusive to everyone. And, with some positive press and more women joining, we can prove it.

How to get more women into crypto

Once more women join the space, a positive feedback loop is created. Ornella observed this with Bankless DAO, saying, “More and more women participating is now possible because there were brave people who stepped up when it was all men in the beginning. They paved the way for new women to come and participate. This is one of the reasons why I stay and is absolutely fundamental to my continued work.”

But how do we start this positive feedback loop? We can’t change the deep societal issues. Unfortunately, you and I are caught up in these things in our daily lives. But there are concrete steps you and I can take to get more women using crypto.

1. Hire outside of the crypto community: While it’s tempting to hire someone who’s been in charge since ’16, if that’s your criteria, you’ll be hiring mostly men. Many women haven’t been in crypto very long for the reasons I described above. However, for a strong company, DAO, or protocol, these different perspectives are essential.

2. Publishing is not a shady job: Not everyone is comfortable with shady jobs, many people need a stable 9-to-5 so they have time to take care of their children and do housework, offering full-time jobs will open the door to new groups.

3. Tell all your friends and family about crypto, not just the ones who bought GME (GameStop's ticker) on Robinhood. There's a place for everyone in this industry, so when you get your friends into crypto, don't just invite the hot guys.

Crypto is going to change the world, and it won’t change the world until all genders are involved. By understanding what the barriers may be, we can create better pathways of entry for those who haven’t yet made the leap.

If we’re going to get everyone on crypto, then let’s bring the other 50% (women) of the population here and move into the future together.

Article written by: Ryan Sean Adams

Article translation: Block unicorn