Cryptography will Cure Gender Inequality
The world has yet to come to terms with the fact that women are awesome.
It doesn’t make any sense to me. Wait — scratch that.
I have the privilege of knowing it doesn’t make sense having been born and raised in the relatively progressive western world.
Nowadays we don’t see much upfront inequality on this side of the planet. It’s nuanced.
Subtle.
Somehow this isn’t any better. The legacy of boys’ clubs still pulses through the veins of big corporations.
Feminism began in the early 18th century. That’s insane. It’s been over two centuries.
The way I see it, feminism acts as a marker of progress. I mean, not to get super intrinsic, but continuous progress is continuous proof of a need for progress.
Women are doing their part. The workplace isn’t doing its part. McKinsey published an article about how women continue to be underrepresented.
To put things in perspective, the Women’s Workplace Equality Index created this global ranking of countries by gender equality in the workplace. These are the top ten and the bottom ten.
I could go on and on about how unfair inequality is and get all in a rage but the truth is this isn’t news. How does any of this relate to cryptography?
I’m Going to Paint a Picture.
A driving component of the fight for equality has always been establishing independence. Not just legally, but achieving acceptance from others in society.
At present, identity and financial independence dictate so much of our social power and influence.
Birth certificates and IDs are integral to our identity, yet millions of women across the world don’t have them.
Imagine not having proof of your very existence.
The specifics of how this is an issue start to look into the process of actually getting a job, qualifying for a passport or even citizenship. Being undocumented is a whole other issue — but it is one that is perpetuated by female inequality.
This is a huge barrier. Women already lack participation in the economy — in places where women can’t have mere control over their identity, they certainly don’t have control over their entry into society.
Gender inequality has a very intimate relationship with financial independence. Many women in third world countries lack access already to traditional financial services that are normal to us in the western world.
These women are 30% less likely than men to have an individual financial account.
Why is financial liberty so important? Because the only real way to build resilience to shocking events or distress is to have control over stores of value.
*Blockchain enters stage right*
Why Gender Equality is Important
Besides the primary argument of it’s fair, there are so many other reasons that gender equality is 🔑 key.
I’ll focus on one of them for now — to explain how blockchain can intervene.
Gender inequality deprives communities of wealth
The gender wage gap is currently 50% globally. If we overcome this gap, the GDP of the average community or nation would increase by 25%.
The World Bank found that countries annually lose $160 trillion globally because of gender disparities.
“Because women earn less than men, human capital wealth worldwide is about 20 per cent lower than it could be.”
How Blockchain will Bolster the Fight for Gender Equality
It all comes back down to independence.
Using blockchain technology, we can give women more access to participate in the economy. It can act as a safeguard of ownership and prevention of falsification of documents.
Ownership + participation = power.
Especially for female refugees. Ladies on the move would benefit from having a place to store and secure medical records, ID papers, and documentation of ownership.
The blockchain will act as a valid alternative where, traditionally, finance has yet to succeed in supplying solid infrastructure.
The blockchain can break financial abuse and promote the economic autonomy of women.
How It Works
The blockchain is a digital, distributed ledger that uses math and cryptography to create a decentralized database for all transactions.
This creates a record that is viewed by an entire community. Anyone with access to the internet will have access to this. Because it is a public ledger, financial fraud will be reduced.
Public authorities will find it harder to enforce traditional financial regulations due to the new possibilities offered by the bitcoin network to bypass traditional intermediaries.
If you’d like to read more about how the blockchain and cryptocurrencies work, specifically the process of adding blocks to the chain, hash functions and more, check out my article that takes a deep dive.
What Will Change
Let’s spit some facts.
There are numerous points of parity between women’s and men’s economic autonomy and participation. At the moment, 1 billion women are undocumented globally.
This means they have no access to financial institutions or their services.
In an ideal world of “full potential” in which women would have an equal stance in labor markets to those of men, up to $28 trillion, that’s 26 per cent, would be added to global annual GDP by 2025.
That’s insane.
This impact is approximately as large as the combined power of the Chinese and US economies.
And it all depends on women achieving their full economic potential.
Another scenario is that instead of women reaching equal footing as men globally, they improved participation on a “best in region” basis.
This hypothesizes the improvement made if all countries progressed towards gender equity at the same rate as the fastest-changing country in their respective regions.
They approximate that $12 trillion would be added to the annual GDP by 2025.
Supporting women in the economy to close gender gaps in the working world is key to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development particularly, Goal 5 on behalf of the UN, to reach gender equality.
But, how do we achieve these metrics? How will women achieve their full economic potential?
What It’s Been Used For
A company called IDbox has tried to tackle the identity issue by presenting a solar-powered device based on blockchain technology.
The device creates a unique digital identity and wallet with just a 2G cell phone ▶️ this means it would work without the internet or electricity.
The box was first tested in Papua New Guinea — a country in which upwards of 80% of the population lack a bank account or official identifying documentation.
Another example is SPENN by a company called Blockbands. They created a digital wallet that grants basic financial services for the storage and exchange of money.
They operate in East Africa and also act as an income-generating opportunity. The World Bank published an article that said if the UN selected this app to use in its refugee camps, safety would be improved.
This is because it would reduce changing hands of physical cash and would promote accounts for women — this means women do not already hold accounts.
Financial freedom for women would also stimulate the refugee camp’s economy and safeguard the women’s right to economic liberty.
The Gates Foundation
Funding from the Gates Foundation is going towards efforts to reduce the unbanked population using blockchain.
The foundation has partnered with Ripple and Coil to financially support pro-peer payment systems.
In 2017, 1.7 billion people were unbanked meaning they don’t have any access to regular banking as a result of having no identifying information.
With a blockchain-powered platform, these individuals have a digital identity and more fiscal access.
The Gates Foundation is no stranger to blockchain-based technologies. They have their Level One Project and have also launched Mojaloop.
What if a powerful backer, like the Gates Foundation, started backing companies or conferences like CryptoChicks or Global Women in Blockchain?
Melinda Gates recently committed $1 billion towards fighting gender inequality. Using the tools I’ve talked about, cryptocurrencies and the blockchain, here are a few specific ways this money could be spent to combat the issue:
- Break Down Barriers to Female Professional Advancement
If a portion of that money were to go towards encouraging things like child day-care or care-giving services within the workplace, towards getting women on equal footing post-maternity leave or cultivating a workplace environment void of sexual harassment and bias, suddenly the largest factors working against women, even in industries beyond tech, become moot.
2. Create More Points of Entry
Traditionally, the workplace was a man’s world. It’s not so far-off to make the connection between this intent and the way the pipeline is built. The structure favors men. As an example, let’s talk about recommendation letters. The pipeline is largely built on an endorsement basis. Most professors or higher up academia are male. This is for a number of reasons, the most prolific being that men typically succeeded to this position and the nature of the job calls for a long commitment — they aren’t leaving their perches all too quickly. It has become natural for the letters to cultivate what has already existed — a male dominant presence in the hierarchy.
If some of the money were to go towards supporting female pursuit of higher education, the positions may begin to see a change, and with it, a change in the demeanor of cultivating female youth.
3. Calling Out Where Call Outs Are Due
Change only really ever happens when the change-makers are loud. A big part of knowing who to call out and how loud to be requires data. Understanding the lives of women, especially those in further minorities, is a necessary step towards actually raising awareness. Moreover, solutions to problems that are misunderstood are even more detrimental than if there were no solution at all — in my opinion. It kind of emphasizes the wrong facets of an issue and changes the intent. That’s the last thing we want to do. Let’s get that data.
A Second Tier Issue
This sounds great. Give women financial freedom, a bunch of positive things will happen.
I have something ironic to share.
Warwick Business School conducted a study that found women investors outperformed their male counterparts in their investments.
Awesome, right?
Regardless of the potential for women to outshine men in the tech industry, we lack representation even in the traditional sector.
Let alone blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
Even engagement with these technologies is primarily male. Of all Ether users, 96% are male. Of all Bitcoin blockchain community engagement, just 5% is female.
Women are underrepresented in this field — how do we kick-start the use of this tech for the betterment of women if women aren’t engaged in it?
What’s even more interesting is that women may literally be biologically better at working with blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Harvard Business Review found that men are more inclined to take risks than women. They found that differences in gender amplify under stress ▶️ men take more risks and women take less under stressful conditions.
Backtracking now, the article then went on to say that maybe women did take as many risks as men — our definition of “risk” is just different.
Men take physical and financial risks. Women consider risks to be things like standing up for the right thing in the face of oppression or being ethical.
These are all dilemmas that could contribute exponentially to work in this field. The blockchain is primarily linked to financial analysis, yes, I’ll give you that.
But studying things like cause and effect, ethical issues and doing the right things with the blockchain and cryptocurrencies are all things that women would excel at improving.
These are all cornerstones of technology. A solid understanding of cause and effect, for example, would allow women to contribute insightfully to community consensus and comprehend the process of cryptographic encryption.
Understanding leads to improvement.
“When facing a risky decision, leaders must weigh a lot of factors. Two of the biggest are, first, the likelihood that the risk in question will help hit strategic objectives and, second, the effect the risk will have on people involved…In my consulting practice, I’ve noticed a tendency for men to put a stronger emphasis on the former and women on the latter.” — the risk adversity of blockchain could biologically be assigned to men but blockchain ethics could be assigned to women.
I don’t think it’s highlighted enough how important emotional intelligence and ethics are — let alone it’s the role in technologies like blockchain.
MIT talked about how the two are connected. Some of the key points they made include
- Pondering what the tech can do and the potential consequences
- Decentralized nature — where does the blame go if something is amiss?
- Is studying crypto networks a breach of privacy?
There is much proof and are many questions awaiting answers in blockchain ethics. Women need to get in on this.
Connecting the Dots
Perhaps if more women involved themselves in the the development and innovation of tech, diversity would literally already exist and this would become a non — issue!
People only ever build problems to their realm of solution's.
You cannot conceive of solutions to problems you haven’t encountered.
If the tech space continues to be filled with young, male developers — the space will continue to innovate solutions to trivial young issues. I’m talking about initiatives like maids on demand or grubhub.
Awareness is not a cliché.
Getting women involved in technology and interested in how it can bridge the inequality gap can have massive returns.
Kelsey Cole from Women in Crypto outlined three steps she believes all women should take to acquaint themselves with the tech.
- Set up a wallet
- Participate in the community (increases knowledge and reputation)
- Research tech and market because of due diligence = success
The tech space needs to change. It is changing.
I think it’s pretty insane that the implications of blockchain and crypto can be so far-reaching and influential as to contribute to a decades-old issue of social injustice and prejudice.
Like, how is this connection even possible? Why wasn’t I ever told about this?
Why don’t more girls know about this?
I think that with the right support and level of awareness, blockchain and cryptocurrencies can change the game of gender inequality.
I’m just a girl trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense.
I also happen to be a 16-year-old blockchain enthusiast, beginner developer, cryptographer, and literary junkie.
I’ve been researching and learning about Blockchain and Cryptocurrency technologies for a few months now.
I’m also deeply interested in behavioral economics, how money moves and disruption within the financial sector.
In learning how to code and the nitty-gritty of the blockchain, I recently built my cryptocurrency, Unicoin. I aspire to change the centralized nature of the traditional economy as we continue to learn more about cryptocurrencies.
If you enjoyed this article and are interested in learning more about cryptocurrencies and blockchain, check out my other articles, give this one some👏 and follow me on Medium!
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