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March is Women’s History Month, an annual celebration of women’s achievements and contributions throughout history. Seeking to counteract the typically male-centred ways of framing history, WHM is a vital opportunity to correct and counteract exclusionary narratives. But it’s also an impetus to think about the present. WHM represents a significant opportunity to reflect on the progress that remains to be made.
Across virtually every industry, women remain significantly disadvantaged in comparison to men. The gender pay gap is still an intractable issue – in the UK, women were paid 7.9% less than men in full-time employment as of April 2021. This year’s International Women’s Day brought this ongoing issue into view when the Gender Pay Gap Bot followed the IWD hashtag on Twitter and shared the gender pay gap of every company that used it. This simple yet effective tool opened people’s eyes to ongoing gender inequality in multiple industries.
For understandable reasons, many have expected crypto to act as a force for equality in many areas, including when it comes to gender bias. The technological innovations underlying the crypto space are designed to ensure an open, peer-to-peer form of interaction that, in principle, does not rely on the identity of those involved. Clearly, we should expect this to act as an equalising force against identity-based discrimination.
However, the reality has been quite different. By virtually all available metrics, crypto is heavily male-dominated. So what can those in the crypto space do to even the field? This post will look at the sources of crypto’s gender gap and highlight some of the projects and people trying to make the industry a fairer and more equal place.
The entrenched gender biases of finance and tech
If we consider that both the finance and tech industries have a long history of gender disparity, it’s perhaps less of a surprise that crypto is facing significant gender equality issues.
Women continue to be underrepresented in the finance sector – and the higher the role, the wider the gap. The number of women working in leadership roles at financial firms is just 21.9% and only looks to reach 31% by 2030 at the predicted rate. So that’s a long time to wait for very little progress.
The number of women working in tech is also disproportionately low, and the gap again gets wider when discussing leadership and senior-level roles. Whilst women make up 28.8% of the tech workforce , they hold a mere 5% of leadership roles. Even at a consistent growth rate, it would take 12 years before the tech industry reached an equal ratio of men to women.
These inequities have deep-rooted sources. The powerful and long-established cultural biases that discourage women from studying STEM subjects, for instance, continue to radically limit the number of women pursuing careers in the tech industry. In the UK, women comprise only 35% of STEM students in higher education – in engineering and technology subjects, this falls to 19%. And the issue is not just fewer women obtaining the qualifications necessary to enter the industry. Women also leave the tech industry at a much higher rate than men, partly due to the gender-based discrimination they must endure in the workplace.
In recent years, there have been many significant initiatives to correct this damaging imbalance. Nevertheless, there remains much to be done – and there are certainly reasons to think that the innovations of crypto tech could be part of the solution. However, these possibilities remain, at present, just that. But, as we’ll see below, it will require a more concerted and proactive effort from those in the industry to make them a reality.
Crypto’s unfulfilled promise of equality
The development of cryptocurrencies has been inseparable from a push toward open and anonymous digital interactions – an impulse that is as much ethical as it is technological. The intention was to evade centralised control and the identity- and verification-based gatekeeping of centralised institutions, which were empowered to decide who could or could not take part. By concealing the user’s identity, blockchain-based transactions should theoretically function as a level playing field where everyone is free to get involved.
Despite such hopes, it seems that crypto has thus far inherited many of the gender biases of the tech and finance industries rather than counteracting them. This tension between the possibilities and realities of crypto is perhaps most clearly visible in the NFT space. The NFT market has […]
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