Who are the ladies I am following on Steemit and what have I learned as a follower? How did they get started and what are they earning today? Would you read this post because you will get answers to these questions here and find amazing women to follow today?
This post is part 2 of Does Steemit Do The Most to Support Gender Equality series at https://steemit.com/steemit/@jerrybanfield/does-steemit-do-the-most-to-support-gender-equality and shows the case studies I used to draw my conclusions that Steemit is the best blogging and social media website ever for women (and therefore for men also)!
Here are some of the women I'm most excited about on Steemit.
Laura Banfield
Laura is an attorney and writer along with being married to me and the mother of our daughter! She has been the single toughest sell for me on Steemit which has helped me to have a wholehearted view of our community here! After months of talking to my wife Laura about Steemit, last week she took a look at it with me and agreed to let me create an account for her. She is planning to test it out by making two posts. One post will be her introduction post and the other will be her candid first impressions of Steemit. We are still traveling as I write this and she will be posting on 
Sweetsssj
One of the first women I discovered on Steemit was 
According to her introduction post, she didn't have hardly any followers online when she started out, she was looking at life to be very challenging as a young woman in China, in terms of her ability to make money and have a career.
She started out on Steemit, she makes about one post a day and her posts are earning around $500 to $1,000 each, that's just amazing.
I'm extremely grateful because I think her story is very inspiring to continue to bring more women into Steemit. If you try and just start a travel blog without Steemit, it's very hard to earn any money off of it at all.
Now you can see that @sweetsssj has been on Steemit for a long time. Now, she didn't start out making $1,000 a post, she has made an amazing blog and put her heart and soul into it over the last year.
I'm just scrolling back, this was way before I was on Steemit. You can see that she does so many different blog entries from what she'd doing, she has amazing pictures on her blog. She just continued to post and post, and build followers, and share her life and do a good job, being of service on Steemit.
When you go forward through all of this, you can see even earlier on, she had posts that were making hundreds of dollars and at the low end, posts making maybe $7, $10 or $15 with some posts making a few thousand.
Now fast forward a year, she's gone through that and now she's making about $1,000 a post.
To make $1,000 per blog post on a blog doing it a different way than Steemit is nearly impossible, at least from my experience. Even being able to work full-time on my blog, this is very difficult. This is why Steemit is exciting because it gives these opportunities, which are especially good for women who often have a more difficult time getting a hold of and having the time and energy to put into doing something like this.
Steemit makes it simple, it cuts out a lot of the extra stuff, this is why I'm so excited about it.
Steemed-open
@steemed-open is on my shortlist of authors I check daily because she has helped me a lot as an author just by her example. She's been on Steemit since July 2016 and she’s made about a hundred posts plus replied to about 700 comments. Her husband is @Sean-King who helped me a lot recently with his comment about paying taxes on Steemit reinforcing the current system I am using!
How has she helped me so much on Steemit? 
She also inspired me with her "Happy Go Topless Day 8/28/2016!" post where she shared pictures of herself topless because I personally feel most vulnerable with the idea of sharing my body without being fully clothed and ready for pictures online. Her willingness to share at this level especially in being a mom and a wife is what helped her to stand out and motivated me to start reading many more of her posts. Seeing her recent posts with just photos and a quick story also has motivated me to consider some fun photos I could make. 
How much is she earning?
On Facebook, you can't share stuff like that. Something you’ve literally drawn of yourself could get you banned.
I think we should all be empowered to do that, men and women. I appreciate the courage women are having, especially, to push these limits on behalf of all of us. These limits which are stifling and holding all of us back, that often men don't have the courage to even get close to. I believe in this wholeheartedly and even suggested it to my wife. She looks beautiful, why wouldn't she feel good about sharing her body out there?
Jess and the sea
On Steemit, if I want to post a picture with just my bathing suit on, with no shirt on, I am allowed to do that and so is a woman. Some of the women are taking advantage of this or using their equal rights, essentially, to post in ways that currently are blocked on most of the social networks.
I am inspired by that because the idea of me posting a picture of something that I've been told to cover up my whole life, and for me that’d be completely nude, since as a man, I really only need to cover up a little bit. That makes me really uncomfortable and vulnerable, even just mentioning it makes me uncomfortable. I appreciate the courage of women willing to share pictures of their bodies, not in a sexual way, but to just share them in a way that is honest and vulnerable because I feel that's one of the best things all of us can do to heal.
When women feel safe enough to just share their bodies, then men can feel safe to do the same and step out of this role of men feeling like an uncontrollable animal, and women feeling like this prey and victim of a man. These are big things we're programmed with.
I feel Steemit is making an outstanding step in allowing "not safe for work" posts. You can see that @jessandthesea has made a few "not safe for work" posts where she's been able to share and have much more freedom to share than what is allowed on Facebook. I'm following her and I'm interested in what she's continuing to share.
Naked bakers
She says in her intro, “I like baking, I like being naked, why not put them together?” Now, this is extremely empowering because normally doing this online would be very difficult to make any money on, because most of the existing payment systems would not allow any type of business like this to process payments.
Right now if you try to process payments for anything that could even be classified as adult entertainment, even if it just involves nudity, just showing your body, not involving anyone else or doing anything with it, just being naked and baking is something that would be very hard to monetize in normal business online.
At the same time, I appreciate the willingness to be vulnerable, to just show your body and bake, because I'm honestly struggling to have that courage myself to just present my body, and that makes me feel more vulnerable than anything else I can think of.
I’m inspired to see that Steemit makes this possible and that women especially, are going forward like @nakedbakers and working on Steemit.
I've been working on my body for 33 years, it is my most beautiful creation. I need more courage and inspiration to feel safe in posting it because my mind says, “No one wants to see you naked, Jerry!”
Then there's all the shame around our bodies and I think Steemit is empowering women especially, to share their bodies and through that empowerment is empowering men to do the same, and allow all of us to step out of being ashamed of our bodies.
I think women in terms of sharing their bodies are much farther along than men in a lot of ways. I'm honored by @nakedbakers' awesome example of using Steemit to advance all of our rights as people.
Alla's yummy food
This is @allasyummyfood, and she is a YouTuber. She's been on YouTube for about three years and with about 40,000 subscribers, if her data is similar to mine, she’d probably be lucky to make $5 or $10 a video in ad revenue.
Meanwhile, on Steemit, if I scroll back to her first introduction post you can see that she's got $20,000 here. She’s done some video tutorials even as far as 11 months ago where she was earning $5 to $20, to several hundred on each of her video.
She's doing a travel blog, she's got all kinds of recipes and there’s a cooking workshop as well. You can see now that she's earned $20,000 on one intro post and most of her other posts for months were making a few dollars, and the lowest ones for $1.40 and $1.31.
She's continued to put amazing content on Steemit over time, and now today, as she's done about a post every day and some days several posts, she is getting around a few hundred dollars per post, and on the low side maybe $60 or $70 on almost every post.
Now as a Youtuber myself, it's really hard to earn decent money on YouTube because you have to have a lot of views. I'm grateful for hundreds of thousands of views every month, that is a ton of views and that makes $1,000 or $2,000 a month.
If I lived in India that’d be plenty of money to live full time, but I live in the USA and I can barely pay my rent. I live in a two-bedroom one bath house with my family and my rent is $1,200 a month, that's a really good deal for the area I live in.
$2,000 a month from YouTube is not nearly enough to do full time, especially with the student loan payments I have. Steemit is providing outstanding opportunities for Youtubers like Alla here.
She’s in the United Kingdom and she's been on Steemit for a year now. She's made Steemit the foundation of her blog, and she shares her videos online there. She’s empowered on Steemit to earn enough.
If you calculate the earnings, she's earning enough now to do this full time and even pay for help. It looks like she's getting about $3,000 to $5,000 a month on Steemit. She’s earning enough to do this full time. That's what's really cool because if she was just doing this on YouTube and on her own blog, she would have to be hustling all over the place to try to do it full time. She’d have to be working with sponsors and she'd have to be running a bunch of ads on her website.
On Steemit she can just focus on doing a good job with her blog, and making her videos. That's why this is empowering, because men are in a better position, generally, to hustle. Men tend to be less caring about what everyone else thinks, more willing to hustle and bully their way around, they are selfish and demand what they want even if it's not good for other people.
Women generally are more agreeable, which means women need a platform for just doing a good job and helping everyone else out and getting paid for it. That's why this is such a good opportunity.
Of course, these are stereotypes. However, we have to have some kind of language to communicate in.
I'm inspired to see that Alla has been putting in the work on Steemit for a year now and this is what adds massive value to our website.
She has so many of these outstanding posts for so long, even when you might think that $10, $20 or $30 a post, isn't that great. That is really good compared to putting them on your blog.
I have 500 plus posts on my blog, the same quality posts I put on Steemit are on my blog, and they make about $20 a month in ad revenue.
I've been on YouTube for six years and have almost 200,000 subscribers, I get about $2,000 a month in ads revenue.
This is why Steemit is amazing.
Yuliana
Here's another, @yuliana who posts videos, pictures, and just shares what she's doing. She shares a kind of blog of her life, she shares what she's thinking about. I believe she's Craig Grant's partner who is one of the top authors on Steemit. She posts what she's doing on Steemit, and then she collaborates with @Craig-Grant.
This makes an outstanding opportunity if you're with a partner or whatever your partnership looks like. I realize that a video like this, no matter what I say, someone's going to be mad at it. I'm doing my best here. I love you. I am doing this for the right reasons. It's awkward, yes, but I'm doing my best.
If you make a good partnership on Steemit, you can make things much easier. For example, I haven't sold my wife on joining Steemit yet, but I talk about it so much. I'm so excited about it for me personally. It's just too much if I try to pressure my wife to join.
If you've got a partner on Steemit like @Yuliana and @Craig-Grant who work together, then that is an outstanding opportunity for both people to help each person get ahead. Especially in this world, where men's egos are some primarily determined by work, my ego’s all tied up in what I do online, and my wife's ego’s primarily tied up in raising our daughter. She gets a lot of herself worth and value out of raising our daughter.
Steemit would give my wife the chance, if she wanted to use it as Yuliana is using it, to go forward with this opportunity. It looks like @yuliana and @Craig-Grant have a son that they raise together. Both of them post on Steemit, and then they're able to vote each other's posts up.
You can see that Yuliana earns good money here posting on Steemit either once or several times a day. She shares things like her pictures of her sushi here that she's out to eat, probably with @Craig-Grant. Then she gets $30 for that on 58 people viewing it. I think that's awesome.
I think that all of us should have the chance to share our lives and get paid for what we're doing. Whereas, if we just do it on social media, we can share our lives and the social media website that hosts get that money.
Erika Harris
Here's another who is a follower @erikaharris. She is another empowered woman on Steemit.
I read her intro post and she's awesome. She's very spiritual, she talks about lots of things and I don't even know how to explain it, just read her blog.
She’s one of the original women on Steemit as well. She has been consistently posting over time.
The idea is that it's not just everyone goes on and posts, and makes a fortune, but Erika is making good money, sharing helpful things like $45 to share this "Better Decisions equals Better Days" video.
She is earning good money to just share, whereas if she was spending this time on Facebook or on Twitter, she wouldn't be making anything out of it. That's why this is a great opportunity. I'm grateful that she continues to post about things like cannabis and other topics.
Steemit gives you the ability to post about a lot of things you might not be able to post about on other social media websites. If you really like cannabis, for example, you can talk about it on Steemit. Whereas, if you went on and talked about it on Facebook, you could get flagged and you could have a problem with your profile.
I really like that Steemit provides, not only the ability to earn income, but the ability to earn income posting about things that you might not be able to post and share about in other places.
On top of that, you can get found in Google. Whereas, if you're posting a bunch on Facebook, you're essentially wasting your time for the long term. If someone doesn't see it in the first few hours, you've pretty much wasted your time.
Now, @erikaharris has made this post for example and if someone searches for Sativa Yoga, they can find her post in six months or in a year.
This post is up there to bring her followers indefinitely and it has already made $70 so far. She can get followers from this for years from now off of this one post she made. Whereas, all the time we devote on other social media networks is largely a waste of time for the long term.
One of the things I've found with my business online is the best work I can do is that which helps me get organic search traffic. This post Erika has made provides her an outstanding opportunity to get people following her for years off of just one post.
That’s why Steemit is so powerful, especially for women who often don't have the same opportunities just by life circumstances. I watched my wife have our daughter and that knocked her out of the willingness to want to work a full-time job. It didn't make sense for her to work full time when she wanted and needed to take care of our daughter.
Women are so much better at multitasking generally, that being able to just do a blog like this, to be able to write a blog and not have it consume your whole life, but to just have a hobby that actually produces some money and has the chance to bring in followers indefinitely is an amazing opportunity. I'm honored to see how Erika is helping us on Steemit today.
Heidi Travels
@heiditravels has been on Steemit since the beginning. You'll see that her posts are making hundreds of dollars. She's talking about cryptocurrencies.
She's got a deep blog that goes back all the way to the beginning of Steemit. She's a very similar journey to many others on Steemit with posting, having some difficult time in terms of when the price was low, and having some incredible posts.
Here's one post with $12,000 on it, and then she's had some posts that have made a lot of money on here as well.
Now, to make $12,000 off a blog is just about impossible in normal blogging world. You'd have to do a lot to get that to happen. It's nice that on Steemit this is possible.
With so many men being on Steemit, it's an outstanding opportunity. We need more women on Steemit because I haven’t seen actual data, but based on my experience as a Steemit user, it seems like there's a lot more men on Steemit.
Which means that it's actually easier as a woman to build an audience, because often, men tend to be attracted to read things by women. I know I am because I'm already in my head as a man all day, and it's good to step out of that and to listen to what my wife, daughter and mother-in-law have to say. That helps me be balanced. The lowest post I think she's had here is this 26 cent one, but that's quite normal. That's just getting started out.
If you sign up on Steemit you might not get $20,000. In fact, the way the algorithm is you're not likely to get much over $1,000 on a post. These aren't all the examples I've seen. I've consistently seen new women, especially, signing up and getting $5, $10, $20, $30, $50 or $100 plus on a post. I've seen several women just signing up the first time and earning $700 plus. You might say, "Is that a bit unfair?" Yes, it's very rare. I've hardly seen any men who've signed up and had that same kind of earning potential.
But this is good. We want empowered women on Steemit because this is good for all of us. We want the women who are going to share and create like @heiditravels has created here. We want this on Steemit because this is worth reading. This brings more people to our website and ultimately, the easier life is for women, the easier life is for men. All of the problems women face are a reflection of the problems men face. There’s no problem women face that men don't also face because we're all in this together.
If something is holding my wife back, it holds me back as well and it forces us into stereotypes. It forces us into roles and eliminates choices. If it's easier for me as a man to earn online, that forces me into the role of earning online. Whereas, if it's easier for my wife and expected for her to take care of our daughter, what if I get jealous sometimes that my wife gets to be number one in my daughter's life?
Having a website like Steemit helps all of us. If a woman can earn more, can post on a blog like this and earn really good money doing that, then that provides opportunity for men, if that's exactly what happens, or a partner to stay home and take care of the child without the need to be at work and slaving away all day.
That really excites me about Steemit. I appreciate all of Heidi's service on Steemit here and I'll show you a couple more of these to wrap it up.
The Book of Uma
Here's @thebookofuma who is a relatively new user. Getting started, being brand new tends to be very challenging on Steemit sometimes, other times it's not.
You can see that she's made a lot of posts since she's first joined. I'm honored that she's resteemed some of my posts. She's got $15 here on her very first post, and then on most of the posts she's been making anywhere from $1 to $10 or $20 on some of her posts. The nice thing is that she can post whatever she wants to.
There’s a lot more creative freedom on Steemit, which I think is especially helpful for women. When other social media start off with not allowing equality in posting pictures, in just a simple thing like forcing the breasts to be covered up, that kind of unfairness is then built into everything else on top of that.
I think that this is awesome, I appreciate @thebookofuma being here and sharing. Let's take a look at one of her most recent posts.
On her post "26 days on Steem," she said that she had so much fun since she's joined.
She said she spent 26 days trying to learn as much as possible, learn about cryptocurrencies. @Craig-Grant brought her into the platform, which is outstanding. Then you can see that she's had time to share and talk about her experience. The nice thing is you don't need a ton of followers. A relatively small amount of followers on Steemit can equal a good amount of money.
She has 161 views on this post, 21 comments and $25 for it, and this is in her first month on Steemit.
This is really exciting when we can start out on Steemit and in the first month to make $25 on a post. I must have made 100 or 200 posts on my blog before one of them made $25. So I'm excited that The Book of Uma is continuing to join us and post, and contribute to Steemit. Welcome to her in her first month.
Karen Mc Kersie
What I'll show you now is @karenmckersie. She's been one of the originals on Steemit and she just posts about whatever she wants to. She's got 1,300 Steemit followers now.
She's made 12,555 posts and she resteems what people have to share frequently. Here's something she's able to talk about, garden fairies. I like that. She posts some pictures of garden fairies here and she's got $5 off of this.
I can upvote her some more too. I can give her a bit more money on this. So let's see, I'll upvote this one. There, I just gave her $3 off of this post because I think it's important that each of us be motivated to share our pictures and our stories on Steemit.
I like to help people get their posts that are under $10 up a bit, so I just voted her post up there. It’s now up to $8. She posts and she's been posting the whole time on Steemit.
She has tons of different posts and she made lots of these funny memes: "You say I can make money blogging on Steemit!?!? CSI Miami investigates!!!"
All right I don't get that one, but it's probably funny. Maybe it's funny that I don't get it.
She took a picture of some street art in another post and this is really cool that you can just experience so much of the world this way.
You can't upvote things that are older than seven days. You can upvote, but it doesn't give you any actual money. I’m thanking @karenmckersie and I would hope it is inspiring if you want to get started on Steemit.
I saw her intro and there is a picture of her too. If you're thinking that you have to be this young beautiful woman to post on Steemit, then you can see that Karen is more experienced at life, as I like to say for some older people. I think in video gaming terms, you're older, you're more experienced, you're leveled up.
So here's the picture of Karen in this post and she just got her new laptop.
She's got $88 on this post, which I think is awesome sharing a picture of her laptop that she bought with Steem. She’s very grateful for that. I think this is an outstanding opportunity no matter who you are to get started on Steemit and to just honestly share your life and make a little bit or a lot sometimes of money off it.
Kaylin Art, April Angel and Andrianna
Finally I'll finish up here with three more.
@kaylinart is earning about $100 on every post she's been posting.
She talks about all kinds of different topics: inspirational things, things about Steemit, how Steemit bought her a gaming computer, signs of a healthy relationship, just lots of helpful posts on here, and it looks like she's in Utah.
Then, another one is @aprilangel. She's been on since December, so that's about half the time Steemit has been up.
She's consistently been posting as well and she's earning a good amount just by doing that.
The last profile I want to show you is @andrianna.
There are tons of these examples, she’s newer and yet she's got $129 on a recent post. She’s earning good money just putting her sketches up on Steemit, which I think is awesome. Just try making money off your sketches not using Steemit, good luck with that.
I'm very grateful for all of these empowered women who are on Steemit, who are helping all of us to grow our own empowerment, helping all of us to be more free.
Final words
What I tried to do is show different demographics. Steemit is not just a great opportunity for young beautiful women or for women from a certain part of the world. You can see that the examples I've given you have been all over.
There have been different parts of the world, different looks, different styles and different hobbies.
This to me is what makes Steemit truly empowering, especially for women.
There are lots more empowered women on Steemit that I just haven't even had time to find. I've shown you some of the ones that have been on the longest and who are posting most frequently.
I appreciate you reading this post until the end.
I'm so excited and passionate about this topic, and yet because I'm a man, these things are so awkward to talk about sometimes.
I've muddled through this as best I can.
I love you, you're awesome.
I appreciate you reading this and I hope it's been helpful for you.
If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield