At my boarding school, there are boys who stay up trading cryptocurrencies; their fingers whir well past midnight. It has become their form of the not-quite-mandatory “dorm bonding.” While the girls dorms go the traditional routes of gingerbread house-decorating and apple picking in the fall, boys make thousands in online portfolios. They surreptitiously check CoinBase on their MacBooks during economics class.
There is a Slack channel about cryptocurrencies as well, in which I am one of two female members. In a recent conversation with a male crypto-loving friend, I got hung up on the ethics of the cryptocurrency space and the lack of diverse representation, while he pushed the more traditional conversational agenda: the potential of blockchain technology, recent growth, the HODL philosophy.
When I first started researching cryptocurrency as a part of a summer project at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, I (naively but perhaps luckily) was entirely unaware of the industry’s widespread reputation as a man’s game. My blissful forays into online Blockchain 101 articles and my gender-balanced project team revealed little of the male dominance.
Some reports place the imbalance in the industry at figures as dire as a 95:5 male to female ratio. In articles highlighting female players, the lists top out at five or eight. I ask myself, are there not even enough women for an influential Top Ten? There are few women, and even fewer from other marginalized groups: where are the black and Latina women, the queer women? Many of the photographs in these articles feature young, professional, thin, mostly white women. After reading the recent journalism by The New York Times, Forbes, WIRED, and others, I am still left concerned.
Because cryptocurrency and blockchain more broadly is, by nature, inextricably bound to money, power in the field means acquisition of wealth (and with that, more power). The gender imbalance is then beyond an issue of culture or of comfort, but one of financial influence in the offline world. This reeks of the problems seen in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. I, for one, do not want a repeat of these phenomena.
I worry, too, about the power of early movers. Even as there are efforts to democratize pay in established industries, the first female presidential nominee from a major party, and other strides toward breaking the glass ceiling, how will women effectively equalize the cryptocurrency space when there is already a landed gentry of wealthy boys with Bitcoin fortunes and heaps of influence?
One influential community for women in cryptocurrency is Crypto Moms, established in 2014. Their mission statement cites a desire to “encourage and assist women to participate in the emerging world of crypto currency overwhelmingly dominated by men.” Still, I think even the name Crypto Moms exposes something amiss; where are the young women in this space? Crypto Moms does not, for instance, have an Instagram account. This represents a sharp disconnect with young women seeking to enter the space; sixty-four percent of adults aged 18–29 are daily Instagram users, according to the Social Media Use in 2018 study by the Pew Research Center.
There is good news: the women in the industry are loud and cool as hell. Chip In’s article mentions, among others, Amber Baldet, who leads JP Morgan’s Blockchain Center, Joyce Kim, and Meltem Demirors. The consistent efforts of the women in the space to encourage the participation of other women gives me hope. It is crucial that this attitude of camaraderie and empowerment continues, despite the social forces of the “Cool Girl” phenomenon common in fields like Sports Media (brilliantly articulated here by Julie DiCaro) that pull to the contrary.
We need to inspire the same enthusiasm in girls and early action in the crypto space that I see in my male friends. There is no objective reason that my female cohort should be any less active in learning and trading than our male peers. Hopefully, then, we will be in place for the same kinds of success seen in the young men who dominate the industry today as well as in a position to spread information and resources to other women who can join in. Clearly, rallying girls in my community and ones like it will not solve many of the existing problems in the space. We need numbers. We need more of the panel discussions that have happened recently in spaces like SXSW and The Wing. We need women writing and talking and gathering...
So, to all my crypto girls: crank Lloyd Banks’s “Make Money,” check out a copy of Burniske and Tatar’s Cryptoassets, get a-Googling, start a portfolio and a cryptocurrency revolution.