Why So Few Women in Bitcoin?

Tech industries are inherently male-dominated for reasons that include boys being introduced to gadgets at a younger age, leading to just 16% of computer science undergraduates being female. Despite initiatives designed to encourage more girls to code, the number of female computer science undergraduates in the UK has actually dropped in the last 10 years. Attributing other reasons to the absence of women in tech is highly contentious, as fired Google engineer James Damore discovered to his peril this year.

In its earliest days, bitcoin was a wild west that evoked memories of the dawn of the internet – another piece of tech whose earliest innovators and adopters were predominantly male. A degree of technical knowledge was required to fully utilize the web back then, and the same holds true of bitcoin even today. While the UX of bitcoin has since improved thanks to development at the application layer, cautionary tales of lost private keys, coins sent to wrong addresses, and phishing attempts are still abound. And those are the sort of mishaps that can befall even experienced operators.

For newcomers, there’s a lot to learn, and that’s not including the dogma surrounding bitcoin and competing claims on which chain is “true”. If bitcoin’s earliest adopters are drawn from industries which are historically male-dominated, it follows that later adopters will be less tech-savvy. Newcomers of both sexes, then, find themselves with a mountain of knowledge to climb.