Whether they’re dedicating their careers to cryptocurrency or just getting their investment portfolio started, women are definitely showing up to the cryptoparty, albeit a little fashionably late.

Women Who Invest Are a Rarity

Last year, Forbes released a list of the richest cryptocurrency investors, and all 20 of them were men. This isn’t surprising if you’re aware of how few women there are who own crypto-assets.

According to a study of investment profiles conducted by eToro, women currently make up only about 8.5% of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. As with most male-dominated industries, however, women are slowly increasing their involvement in the crypto industry. It may take awhile — women still make up only about 25% of the tech industry in general — but a financial feminism movement is on the rise.

The Financial Feminism Movement

The term “financial feminism” has been popping up online much more frequently in the past few years. This past October, finance blogger Brynne Conroy published The Feminist Financial Handbook. Thanks to the plethora of additional educational resources the internet provides, women are feeling more empowered than ever to make better financial decisions.

When women do choose to invest their money they tend to ensure that they are well informed about their investments and they tread carefully. A study commissioned by Circle found that women are much less likely to consider themselves “aggressive” investors. Among millennial women in particular, only 27% of cryptocurrency investors admitted to being aggressive, compared to 42% of millennial men.

That same study also found that more than twice as many millennial men were considering investing in crypto in the near future (18% compared to 7% of millennial women). Although more men may be interested in future crypto investments, that 7% figure shows that there are still plenty of women who are thinking about giving crypto a try.

Ultimately, as more women decide to take control of their financial futures we will see them further breach the gap between male and female investors.

Breaching the Crypto Gender Gap

In the meantime, here are some recent examples that demonstrate how women are working hard to diversify the cryptocurrency space:

• Female-centric crypto meetups are happening all over the U.S. Two of the most popular ones are in San Francisco and New York City.
• Women are starting podcasts that discuss blockchain and cryptocurrency. Running with Unicorns is a crypto podcast by Chitra Ragavan, a former journalist and Chief Security Officer of Gem; Unchained and Unconfirmed are podcasts run by Laura Shin, who was the first mainstream journalist to cover the crypto industry on a full-time basis; ZigZag is a podcast about women and capitalism that often takes on crypto-related topics.
• Women have been creating their own crypto-related companies. For example, former Olympian Maria Prusakova and Alexandra Karpova co-founded the Crypto PR Lab, an advisory agency for blockchain businesses; Galia Benartzi co-founded Bancor, a company that developed a new protocol for creating intrinsically-tradeable smart tokens; (Need one more recent example).
• Organizations like Women’s Coin, CryptoChicks, and Global Women in Blockchain have made it their mission to educate women on blockchain technology and cryptocurrency investing.
• Crypto Springs, a conference that takes place in October in Palm Springs, California had a lineup of speakers in 2018 that was predominantly women.

Additional Reading

This Medium article by Moriah Khalili goes more in depth about the importance of women in tech and lists the top 10 most influential women in the cryptocurrency industry.

CoinBundle also compiled a similar list of notable women of crypto.