The women take on Crypto Bros

LISBON, Portugal – When Molly White, one of the world’s most high-profile critics of Web3, looked at the analytics for a video of a Stanford lecture on blockchain abuse that she had posted on her YouTube channel, it confirmed one of her deepest – had suspicions about the place in which she operated.

“Ninety-five percent of the people who saw it were men,” she said. “It’s funny, because I knew from my Twitter that there are men across the board. There are no statistics, it’s really just your interpretation. But the YouTube video confirmed my guess.”

As Web3, which crypto boosters say is the next version of the World Wide Web, gradually comes into focus, new and old problems continue to emerge. One of them is inclusion.

Many hoped that Web3 would be a decentralized online world where our identity wasn’t really supposed to matter. Yet a 2021 survey found that twice as many men as women use cryptocurrency; in NFT trading, women represent only 5 percent of the total sales volume. The Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami earlier this year left a trail of sexual harassment in its wake, while a vote to remove the head of the Ethereum Name Service Foundation who made anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion comments failed.

Crypto’s gender gap was born in the finance and technology industries it originated from. In 2021, female founders secured just 2 percent of venture capital in the US, the smallest share since 2016. NFTs may have skyrocketed in popularity as a form of digital art, but only 29 percent of digital artists are women.

White spoke to VICE World News on the sidelines of the Web Summit in Lisbon, one of the world’s largest technology conferences. At the conference’s crypto phase, 30 women spoke, against 37 men. And many women came to see White’s speech about whether Web3 was, in her words, “bullshit.”

“There is widespread bigotry in the industry.”

Her criticism of Web3 and crypto specifically is broad, taking in the lack of consumer protections and the proliferation of fraud. But she is also outspoken about the toxicity of the mostly male society that dominates this new area.

“It’s pretty clear that the crypto industry is heavily male-dominated and reflects the tech industry more broadly,” White said. “Crypto is unlike anything else I’ve experienced in technology in terms of how toxic society is. People get very passionate about specific technologies all the time, like your favorite programming language. But you’re not aggressive towards people who don’t like your language. Not like how crypto people are When you criticize someone who has a token it’s like you’re threatening their bottom line.

“There’s also a real religious dogma around crypto. They say it’s the future, and if you disagree with that, you threaten the future. They say, ‘Don’t you want to prosper? Don’t you want to knock the unbanked?'”

Something else White has noticed is a community of crypto fans who identify as “anti-woke.” “They believe that any intentional effort to improve racial diversity or gender diversity is bad and should be avoided, which is why big tech companies are going to see their downfall,” White said. She has seen users being told to take advantage of the anonymity that cryptocurrencies offer by hiding the fact that they are women. “Pretend you’re the white guy who makes it,” White recalled. “There is widespread bigotry in the industry.”

Vilma Mattila, lawyer and founder of 5irechain, which she describes as the world’s first sustainable blockchain, has empathy. She said she has been told by others in the industry she did not want to name to stay neutral when it comes to gender equality, and was expressly advised once not to come out as a feminist “because it will affect the company” as well who are told, “Don’t be political”.

She believes that she would not have been able to co-found 5ire without her two co-founders, who are men. “In the beginning it would have been more difficult for female co-founders. People are not willing to invest in women. I ask male colleagues to consider investing with me too – the funny thing is if I bring products that are male based they often invest, no problem. If it’s founded by a woman, they call it a ‘high-risk decision'”.

“‘Do you have any women on your team who created this protocol? No?’ Well, then it ends up being exclusionary.”

Ironically, as happy as she is politically, Mattila can no longer talk about crypto on social platforms because she has joined non-crypto funds and councils that prohibit her from promoting cryptocurrencies – meaning she cannot use her platforms to increase equity. there longer. “There are 200 million people in crypto, many come and go,” she said. “People appreciate if you dedicate and give to community and ecosystem; nurture talent, educate others.”

Elsewhere at Web Summit, it’s not just politics or attitudes that affect inclusion; it is the technology itself. On a panel on how blockchains can create an inclusive society, Marieke Flamant, CEO of the Near Foundation, and Lacey Hunter, co-founder of TechAid, didn’t mention crypto-bridge culture once — instead, they talked about simplicity, de-organization, and bringing in. not just builders, but also UX designers who can make blockchains usable for people unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts.

“Before entrepreneurship, I was at Amazon, and we saw very quickly if the products were being designed without considering diversity,” Hunter said. “For example, when you searched for ‘nude underwear’, what color do you think came up? I thought, ‘Do you have any women on your team who created this protocol? No?’ Well, then it ends up being exclusionary.”

In blockchain, the same 360-degree hiring must happen for “mass adoption,” the panel’s buzzword, so that different teams create products for different people who don’t need to really understand what blockchain is. Mattila also addressed accessibility, saying that “99 percent of the population doesn’t know how to code. That’s why we provide payment for a phone number – because we identified 1 billion people who don’t have access to an identity or a bank, but they all have a phone number.”

All of the women VICE World News spoke to said they’ve seen the representation of women in the industry increase over the years, just not at the rate they would have liked; for many of them, the lack of equality between the sexes has not been a barrier either.

Amélie Arras, known as the first woman to travel the world paying exclusively for everything in Bitcoin, said that while the crypto groups she encountered across the 16 countries she visited rarely had any women in them, they were always welcoming. Beenish Saaeed, director of operations at NFT startup Boss Beauties, said she was able to meet women on Twitter and Discord who were all motivated by crypto’s opportunity to “create generational wealth” to create projects together, despite a climate where “when women do something, it’s celebrated, but very temporarily. It never hits the headlines.”

Now the director of marketing at Zumo, a crypto wallet and payment platform, Arras told VICE World News that while she’s seeing more women attend crypto conferences since 2017, her biggest problem is finding women talk at said conferences.

“There are three pages of content creators who are all men. I’m the only woman.”

“I think it’s hard to get women to speak on panels and come forward to speak on stage. It always seems to be the same women who can come forward, she said. “Women must stand up and not be shy to speak. At Zumo we launched crypto confidence, a monthly meeting where I want only women to come. I was told it was exclusionary for men, but I don’t feel it is because men can be inspired by women. It is much easier for a woman to be inspired by another woman.”

For women who are inspired by other women, not everyone has the money to buy a Web Summit ticket – a sense that Wendy does not reveal her last name and only goes by CryptoWendyO online to protect herself and her family from threats , know well. Without a technical background, Wendy originally started creating content because she had taught herself how to start trading bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and wanted to network with others. She would never have been able to afford a Web Summit ticket then. “I was poor, I didn’t have the money to pay thousands of dollars to see someone show their coin or their project,” she told VICE World News over a video call.

Real life encounters transitioned into content creation and she now has the largest YouTube platform for a female content creator in the Web3 space. Her analytics also show that 95 percent of her viewership is male—identical to what Web3 critic White observed on his own YouTube. “When you look at my analytics, it says ‘other content creators similar to you’ and there are three pages of content creators that are only male. I’m the only woman,” Wendy said. A week ago when she searched for “crypto” on YouTube, she was the only female creator who appeared on the first page of results; searching today, not a single woman shows up in the top 20 videos recommended for me.

But other platforms may show an opportunity for diversification; women make up 28 percent of Wendy’s TikTok following. “That’s why I like to create content there, I can reach a completely different audience there.”

Wendy’s advice to all women overwhelmed by the ongoing lack of gender equality was to “take 10 minutes every day and invest in yourself. If you don’t know what a word means, educate yourself.”

And in her Web Summit panel, Hunter, the TechAid co-founder, added: “If you’re a woman looking for a role model to invite you into the room, don’t choose yourself. Find someone you resonate with, whose values ​​align with yours, and ask them, ‘Can I join and can I bring a friend?'”

“It is our duty to rise.”

Supported by Omidyar Network. VICE World News retains complete editorial autonomy.