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Every community—the developers, executives, venture capitalists, academics, and even bloggers who work in the decentralized technology and the digital currency has a diversity problem.
The bitcoin industry has what Brian Forde, director of digital currency for MIT Media Lab, calls a "pale male" problem. (At a roundtable discussion about BitLicense, all of the bitcoin executives and policy pundits were male—the only female in the room was a reporter covering the talk.) An ongoing Coindesk survey first posted in March asks, "Is the Bitcoin community just young, white and male?" A separate survey from 2017 concluded that 97% of bitcoin "users" are male.
According to the traffic-tracking site Alexa, women are vastly underrepresented on bitcointalk.org, the major Bitcoin discussion forum, and a poll by one forum member found 88.7 percent of respondents identified as male (and of the remaining, 5.3 percent selected “other,” leaving just six percent as female). So rare are women in the community, in fact, that the forums warn members not to do business with “any user blatantly claiming to be female”—because they’re probably a scammer.
SO WHY ARE SO FEW WOMEN PARTICIPATING IN BITCOIN?
There are a few obvious reasons that Bitcoin wouldn’t attract as many women as men. Firstly, it’s hardly a secret that there’s a big gender gap in the tech sector in general. Fewer women work in STEM fields; fewer women attend tech events; fewer women even have access to the internet.
Bitcoin Expo organiser Alex Breadman out in an email, “there is less than 15 percent of Bitcoin entrepreneurs that are women, which is lower than the tech average.” While the number of women in tech jobs is depressingly low, it’s not as depressingly low as the figures above.
One argument is that women are more averse to financial risk than men. The Keiser Report and an early Bitcoin adopter, pointed to a recent survey by a British bank that found women saved an average of 41 percent of their annual earnings, while men saved just 23 percent. If women are simply more careful with money, that could explain their reluctance to invest in the volatile Bitcoin currency, especially when it was in its infancy.
PUA PYLAND, the self-styled "BITCOIN WIFE"
To investigate the women and Bitcoin mystery further, people reached out to one of the best known female Bitcoin enthusiasts to get her thoughts on why women seem to have missed the party. Pua Pyland, better known as the Bitcoin Wife or Mrs. P, promotes the use of bitcoins among women on her website, which showcases products aimed at women that can be bought with bitcoins.
Pyland, as one of the most visible female Bitcoin presences, identifies herself largely in relation to her husband as the homemaking, mothering, cookie-baking “Bitcoin Wife”—but it’s hardly her duty to represent the everywoman on what is, after all, her personal blog. She says some women have sent her messages chastising her for being "anti-feminism," and states she's not anti-anything. "On the contrary, I'm merely pro-Bitcoin," she said. When asked Pyland that why she thought Bitcoin was male-dominated, she echoed the reasons above, and added that the influence of gaming—another male-heavy space—might have helped give men a technical boost in the early days of Bitcoin mining.
When looking at Bitcoin historically, as an emerging technology and financial open-source platform based on the internet, it's really no mystery that there has been a lack of women around here. For one thing, Bitcoin parallels the same trends in the the tech space, where, aside from the outliers, men are generally the early adopters and developers of technologies, and women follow suit. I think this is especially true for Bitcoin when looking at the early days when adoption was fueled by GPU mining, which required video cards and PC gaming hardware. And who typically uses high-end video cards? Gamers…another arena dominated by men.
WHY BITCOIN NEEDS WOMEN
Pyland agrees that women will be key players in the expansion of Bitcoin. “Having more women involved is crucial to Bitcoin's success, if we want to see mainstream adoption,” she says. “We hold the power of the pursestrings, we constitute the fastest growing segment of the small-business owner community, and it has been proven that the diversity women bring to the tech space boosts innovation and creativity."
She makes some good points. According to a Forbes report earlier this year, women across the world control some $20 trillion in annual consumer spending, and that’s estimated to rise to $28 trillion in the next five years. Meanwhile, a Nielsen report shows that women in the US outspend men everywhere except convenience stores and gas stations. If they aren’t interested in using Bitcoin, its reach will remain severely limited.
If women continue to be alienated from the cryptocurrency, this appeal could soon diminish. Bitcoin may not be controlled by anyone per se, but if men are creating the payment solutions, running the exchanges, curating the conferences, and dominating the discussions, it could quickly lose its liberating edge for women, and be discarded as just another boys’ toy. When MRA guys like this get internet airplay with views that Bitcoin could bring about the "downfall of feminism" (spoiler: his argument doesn't really make any sense), it's not exactly encouraging for women to get involved. And that would be bad for everyone who likes the idea of the decentralized currency.Because it may just be that the future of Bitcoin depends on women. If it's to become more than a technical curiosity—a geeky hobby that once made a few teenage coders rich, to the general bemusement of the rest of the world—it quite simply needs a broader range of people to join in and push for widespread use of Bitcoin as an actual currency. The more different people demand Bitcoin services, develop Bitcoin projects, and even lobby for Bitcoin to maintain its defining features in the face of regulation, the more likely it is to stick around.
Reference:
http://fortune.com/2015/04/24/women-in-bitcoin/
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x3y4j/bitcoin-needs-women
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