“Girls, they just Want to Have Fun”: A Non-Material World?
Where is the equality? Are we ever going to resolve the male-female issues through cryptocurrency or are they intrinsic to human society? It seems like there is nothing we can do to fix this imbalance? “We are living in a material world and I among the (non-)material girl”?! Who would have thought Madonna and Cyndi Luaper would have a take on cryptocurrency (LOL). While it seems Madonna and Cyndi Luaper are quiet on this issue, their classic songs seems to speak volumes about cryptocurrency, at least the women’s place in society and in cryptocurrency too.
Femanism, Femanism, and Action
Cryptocurrency is supposed to level the playing field for everyone. It takes out the middleman and decentralizes the power. A peer-to-peer system should empower all people to take control of their own finances, for better or worse. This system is set up exactly to address power imbalances. It seems this social experiment is teaching a sad truth about who we are. To put it bluntly a white, male dominated globalized world. Are we doomed to stay in this situation or can girl power turn into fierce action taking on real businesses in real time and thereby tackling this challenge in the real world?
Women in Tech Band Together
“Equal opportunity, equal pay”. We are all familiar with this dictum/mantra. However we are still chanting this slogan. It is amazing that we can click a button to: send an e-mail to anywhere and to multiple places in the world, buy from anywhere in the world, and now pay for almost anything anywhere in the world, both in currency and cryptocurrency, but we still cannot get the workplace to treat everyone equally?!
There is a whole website devoted to women in tech. This website’s entire aim is to help women in technology with their careers. They offer conferences, job fairs, events, enrichment programs, and other resources. There are many, many other sites, articles, and resources set up to help, improve, and empower women in the work place and in tech jobs. Again, the obvious question is why are we still addressing issues of inequality?! Talk is cheap and there is a lot of talk out there on this topic. These power women are taking action and taking on businesses in the real world in real time.
Women in Cryptocurrency
Bettina Warburg, Kathryn Haun, Galia Benartzi, Diana Biggs, Dr. Neha Narula are some powerful women in cryptocurrency. They all have amazing TedTalks, however their resumes are more impressive. It would be very interesting to know how many people recognise these names.
These brave women have all made significant contributions to cryptocurrency. It is noteworthy that, despite their achievements, a cryptocurrency conference set up at Museum of American Finance left the organisers Forbes and Michael Casey, the chairman of CoinDesk’s advisory board and MIT research advisor on the blockchain, embarrassed. They realised there was not one female speaker at their event. Both Forbes and Casey encourage women to enter cryptocurrency and blockchain technology fields. So what is going wrong?
Reality does not Reflect Sentiments
With all these powerful women and more, it seems like women are doing well in cryptocurrency. However it is very clear that women form an extremely small percentage of the cryptocurrency world. This is very surprising because the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is open source.
It seems like the underlying philosophy of a central core of the Bitcoin community has a male, white supremacist agenda according to finances magnets. The statistics they quote on the women in the cryptospace leaves us to question what is going on that we cannot get past in this male/female challenge.
Summary
Is our world hard-wired for an imbalance between men and women? Can we really address this. Many have taken on the torch, in the tech space we have “Women in Tech”, in the cryptospace we have Forbes and Casey, but there still seems to be a significant gap between the men and women in a space that should intrinsically level the playing fields between haves and have nots. In other words, minorities should have an equal footing in this space. This does not seem to reflect what is still happening in the cryptocurrency space. Despite the strong role models, such as Bettina Warburg, Kathryn Haun, Galia Benartzi, Diana Biggs, and Dr. Neha Narula, we still need to see a real and significant shift in the statistics. What will the future hold? Can we finally break poverty and help the unbanked, men/women challenges in the workplace, and bring a significant voice for minorities through cryptocurrency? Many people are working on solving these problems, but it seems we have more to do for this to be a reality.
