Cryptocurrency Market: Where are all the Women?
Women in tech has long been a contested issue, and rightfully so. Although a concerted effort has been made to increase workplace diversity over the years, not one of the 23 tech companies lauded for their efforts even has a gender employment ratio of 50:50. With this lack of diversity, its harder for women to acquire the same information that can so casually come down the grapevine at these tech companies.
One sphere of debate that has undoubtedly enamoured the tech sector is the rise of Blockchain development, and with respect to this subject, women are left out of the conversation. As you can see in the chart above, A recent study by E-Toro claimed that only 8.5% of Cryptocurrency traders are female. The study went on to analyze each genders investment preference, and based off the tech sectors lack of female diversity the results aren’t shocking. Ripple, a cryptocurrency that most people in the blockchain space aren’t enthusiastic about due to its infrastructure (it doesn’t use miners, and uses a centralized consensus mechanism), is the overwhelming digital asset of choice for women; why is this?
Well we’ve already identified the lack of a female presence in tech, so if women aren’t in tech then where are they, and where do they get their information from? The answer, to the surprise of many, is financial services. Per a report by Morgan Stanley, the financial services industry has the strongest female to male employment ratio of any industry at 50:50. Based off this, when you look at female investment preferences, there’s a strong correlation between their source-of-information and their investment strategy. Banking is the most bullish industry on Ripple for two reasons. The first being operational efficiency; Ripple’s network has the potential to yield a higher TPS (Transactions Per Second) then the current systems used in banking like SWIFT. The second reason is that Ripple isn’t truly decentralized, so they can still control and oversee activity on the network. Flipping over to the male side, the most popular cryptocurrency by far is Ethereum. The coding language used to build Decentralized applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain is called Solidity, and the number of male solidity developers far outweighs that of female developers. Are you beginning to see the correlation? If people in tech (more males in tech then females) like more technically sophisticated alt-coins like Ethereum, then its reasonable to assume that people in banking (compared to the tech sector, employs more women) will prefer alt-coins that are better positioned for the financial services industry, hence women’s love-affair with Ripple.
Women preferring Ripple compared to other alt-coins is neither good nor bad, the cryptocurrency industry is called the wild west for a reason; behavioural finance is a very real phenomena and any coin can go “to the moon”. Moreover, just because people in tech aren’t high on Ripple doesn’t mean it doesn’t provide value to other sectors. Instead, these figures merely highlight the information bias that specific industries can succumb to. If we want to increase the level of diversity within the blockchain ecosystem, then our efforts must go well beyond just cryptocurrency and blockchain. Information is a powerful tool and until their is more employment diversity in the tech sector then women won’t gain the same first-hand knowledge as their male counterparts, and the blatant disconnect between female and male cryptocurrency investors will only continue to widen.
For more news check out LinkCoin on:
