A blog post by Catherin Power, adjunct senior fellow for Women and Foreign Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Mayia Moncino, research associate in international economics at the CFR, notes that women are not represented enough in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industries. The authors conclude that there is a significant imbalance between the two genders, with women being “shockingly underrepresented.”
The blog cites Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Analytics, which reports that 91.2% of people involved with the Bitcoin space are men, according to June 2018 data.
According to the authors, blockchain could potentially transform many aspects of our lives, including in finance, even though some skepticism on its long-term efficiency remains. Blockchain has been around for almost a decade, but women haven’t played a significant role in developing and expanding it. A recent survey conducted by Quartz found that out of 378 crypto startups founded between 2012 and 2018, only 8.5% had a woman as a founder or co-founder. The situation is worse than in the tech sector in general, where 17.7% of startups were founded by women.
In February, The New York Times published an article that discussed the conference party for the North American Bitcoin Conference back in January, which was held at a strip club in Miami. At the event, there were 84 male speakers, but only three female speakers. Moe Levin replaced two of the men with two female speakers after some complaints about the imbalance, but he said it was not intentional.
The problem is not only about the distribution of cryptocurrency-based value. Women might have great potential in contributing to the industry growth on overall.
Duncan Stewart, research director of technology at Deloitte Canada, noted:
“There are studies out there that suggest men are predisposed towards bubbles in a way that women are not.”
The Council on Foreign Relations is a US nonprofit organization that focuses on international affairs and foreign policy. CFR is behind the Foreign Affairs journal and leads the David Rockefeller Studies Program, which has a significant impact on the US foreign policy by contributing with recommendations to the presidential administration and diplomats.
Last year, we reported that CoinAgenda’s conference sparked outrage after inviting a convicted woman abuser as speaker.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
