The Blockchain Industry’s Gender “Gap” Is More Like a Canyon

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Breaking news: There aren’t a lot of women in blockchain.

Surely you catch the sarcasm. The blockchain/cryptocurrency
space is known for its high concentration of white men, kind of
like the U.S. Congress or the membership of a New England
country club (which, to be fair, likely overlap). The phrase
“women in blockchain” comes up frequently—on disappointing
cruise ship panels, in meetup groups , and in news stories
about attempts to make blockchain more “inclusive” —because
they’re seen as rare creatures worth studying, like the pygmy
three-toed sloth. Even UNICEF’s Innovation Unit, an
organization that strives for gender inclusivity and has a staff
that’s 70 percent women, could only find one female founder in
the six blockchain startups to which it recently promised
funding.

A report out this week from LongHash , an organization that
analyzes blockchain-related data, suggests just how bad the
gender gap might be. Of the 100 most recently launched
blockchain startups LongHash compiled from the website ICO
Rating, 85 percent of the total 1,062 listed team members
(which included 326 C-suite executives and 473 advisors)
were men, according to information provided by the companies
on their own websites. Men made up nearly 93 percent of
executive positions, roughly the same percentage as male
advisors. Thirty-seven of these new startups had no women
on their teams whatsoever, while 78 had no female executives.

LongHash went deeper into these numbers and discovered
they were generous. When it raised the bar to look for startups
with more than one female executive, LongHash found only
one. When it discounted two startups that had unusually large
advisory boards, the percentage of female advisors fell below
six. And it’s rare for companies to have both female advisors
and female executives. Perhaps this indicates a “checking a
box” attitude toward including women among a team’s higher-
ups.

There were disclaimers for LongHash’s research. Some team
members had gender-neutral names that may have muddied
the data, and typically gendered names don’t always
correspond to people’s gender identities. Then there’s the
possibility that startups, being startups, didn’t quite have it
together to include all of their team members on their websites
—or they’re in the process of adding new people (maybe
women!) to their growing companies.

Meanwhile, the companies listed on ICO Rating seem to vary
widely in their legitimacy; its list of newest startups include an
“infused water” blockchain company and something called
Honey Badger Investment Fund, which is “dedicated to
financing invoices globally with the use of blockchain
technology” and wants to raise more than $100 million in its
upcoming ICO. In other words, let’s take LongHash’s data with
a grain of salt.

That said, there are plenty of other statistics that point to the
gender disparity in blockchain. According to Google Analytics
data analyzed by Coin Dance, a bitcoin statistics platform,
bitcoin community engagement is dominated by men, who
make up about 91 percent of this “engaged” group of the
bitcoin-involved.

A May 2018 study from Quartz found that gender disparity in
the crypto/blockchain space goes back at least to 2012.
Quartz looked at 378 venture-backed companies founded
between the start of that year and January 2018, discovering
that just one had an entirely female founding team, while only
about 8 percent of founding teams included women at all.
Among blockchain companies, about 85 percent had all male
founders, while close to 75 percent of founding teams at other
types of tech companies in that time span were all male. Of the
1,004 people Quartz surveyed through its social media
channels and newsletter (an inherently skewed sample), 81
percent who said they were somehow involved in
cryptocurrency were men.

Blockchain companies, of course, aren’t alone in their lack of
women; even established tech giants struggle to attract and
retain female employees. At Facebook, for instance, 36% of
global employees are female (bad, but decidedly better than
blockchain companies). Let’s give big boy Mark Zuckerberg a
grateful pat on the back.
All of this data may make you wonder, “What must it be like to
be a woman in blockchain?”

You can probably imagine. Sexism and misogyny happen in
largely male-occupied spaces…and in mostly female-occupied
spaces, like New York City. However, highlighting the lack of
women in an industry can also discourage other women from
approaching it, further widening the gender gap.
Then there’s the inherent problem of someone’s minority
status inappropriately defining them; people who are doing
interesting work want to be recognized for that, not for what
bathroom they use. So next time you get the urge to ask a
woman what it’s like to be a woman in blockchain, think about
that—and then don’t ask.

Source : https://breakermag.com