Why Aren't More Women In Blockchain?

The short answer is, because they don’t want to be. First, a little background. I first started programming in 1978 as part of an elective math class at my high school, this was a very rare opportunity at the time and I did very well at it, as I recall, the class was pretty evenly split between boys and girls. In 1983 I went to a computer programming trade school for 6 months, again it was a fairly even split between male and female, but this time we had a lot of drop outs, about ¾ of the women dropped out and about ¼ of the men. The ones left were quite good at what they did because they were interested and worked hard and learned it. In the intervening 35 years, I haven’t run into a lot of female programmers and the ones that I’d consider excellent, I can count on one hand. That said however, I have ran into a lot of excellent women doing analysis, analytics, BI and QA work in the IT industry.

There is a lot of hand wringing that there aren’t enough women in IT or women in blockchain or women in Big Data, but what my first hand experience is, is that they just don’t want to do the work to be a part of it. The popular cause right now is blockchain, I’m even helping with a women in blockchain conference, and I relay my experiences shortly, but then on Feb 28, 2018, I get the following email, I’ve blocked out critical names and information:

Go ahead and absorb that for a minute while I tell you about my experience with Women in Blockchain. First, the rarity of them, like Unicorns, means that any woman that can speak in front of a crowd will get paid and flown all over the country. I have yet to see any of them do anything other than talk about blockchain in the most general type of ways, this is true of a lot of the men too, but they aren’t bringing anything to the party other than being a woman. I have yet to met one, read one, listen to one or watch one, that actually knew anything about the tech at a low level and could talk about design, language, optimizations. In fact, while working on this WiB conference, none of the women actually knew much about it, certainly none could code it, but they all wanted to be presenters or panelists to talk in vague terms about how democratizing blockchain is.

While helping with WiB we’ve seen women complain that men were involved at all, we’ve seen lots of demands of what should happen and who should be there. We’ve encouraged the women to take over and take charge of the conference, but without exception, every single one has refused claiming they are too busy (seriously? I work 16 hours a day) or just flake out entirely. My favorite was when one of them posted a meme about how sharding on the blockchain is kind of a holy grail and she said “wouldn’t it be great if a woman solved this?”, um no, not really, we just want it solved, no one really cares who solves it. If you want to solve it, work really really hard and solve it.

When I wanted to get into blockchain, I just started reading and researching and doing tutorials and watching videos for about 20 hours a week for a good 6 weeks to get a grounding in the environment. I decided to write a “Beginners Guide to Blockchain” to force myself to learn it. I spent hundreds of hours on the topic, going to meetups, talking to people, writing articles and getting to a point of being fairly knowledgeable. What I’m seeing in the blockchain space is a bunch of wannabes that want to make a quick buck and just set themselves up as a youtube analyst or similar. This is true of men and women in the space, but the point is there is nothing stopping women from being in this space other than their own desire and effort.

One 5 woman panel I saw at a blockchain event consisted of four of the women perpetually talking about how they were “serial entrepreneurs” but really nothing about blockchain. One of them women talked about how a company gave her a chance in a junior role even though she had no knowledge or experience in the position and her argument was that men should give more unqualified women a chance at a job instead of a qualified man. That isn’t exactly how she worded it, but that was the meaning. The message from this panel in general was ‘give women a chance, even if they are unqualified’.

My experience has been that most of them want a red carpet rolled out for them and everything handed to them, with no real effort and no unpleasant experiences. I personally contacted over 300 companies doing ICO’s to learn what they were doing. That was a lot of research a lot of rejection and a lot of frustration. No one handed it to me or explained the job to me, I made it up and learned as I went. As to the email I received, I just reject pretty much everything she was asserting. The rash of sexual harassment that has been uncovered recently has created an environment of weaponized accusations. A man cannot be alone with a woman with regard to work anymore, it just isn’t safe. Real abuse and harassment needs to be dealt with quickly and harshly, but there are so many fake accusations now that women expecting men to give them positions they aren’t qualified for, are just fooling themselves. The better thing to do is just work hard and be the best. Don’t rely on handouts and quotas, you will be overwhelmed and you won’t be respected.