Love the name ladybits for crypto. I have trouble understanding why more men than women are involved in crypto when there is no gender based barrier to entry. Any individual can decide, irrespective of gender and with no institutional discrimination, to set up a coinbase account and input their credit card.
Are women just fundamentally less interested in high risk/reward investments than men? If that difference holds true over the overall general populations of women and men, is it cultural or evolutionary in nature?
I would love to see some statistics. For anyone interested, Steven Pinker's book "The Blank Slate" is excellent and dives deep into this subject. I tend to take the less politically correct but biologically obvious view that men and women do have some general personality differences along with physical. Regardless of any sex differences, whether originating from nature or nurture, every human should have freedom of opportunity in any area. As crypto's success is correlated to adoption, I believe everyone will be happy to have the women on-board =)
I think it may inherently just be that computers in general are a man's world. I believe I was watching a video about how many more women used to be in the development and design in computers, as a lot of the original creators of the first computers were women. Women have always been as good at numbers and statistics, but when the first few computers were released, they cut women out of the picture, and advertised them as "boy's" toys for gaming etc. They were not marketed to girls so much, and so boys were the first to hop on them and start using them. This generation of boys grew up to be the leaders of Silicon Valley and women have never caught up. Now it is nearly impossible to. Blockchain programming is built on top of regular programming, so even if someone such as myself were interested in being able to start into that field, I would have to start from the very beginning, in an area where many of my male equivalents are YEARS ahead of me, by 15 or so years. I feel like I will never catch up. I have a feeling that even if women were inherently interested in this as I am, that they may feel the same way, discouraged and defeated. So I think making this as easy and attractive to women as possible would be really awesome!
I think you're on to something with the marketing issue. There could be a negative feedback loop where:
Subject X is not advertised to Group Y because they aren't perceived as interested -> Group Y don't see advertisements and are therefore Subject X doesn't capture their attention so they are less interested -> Subject X is not advertised to Group Y...
With the ability of modern targeted advertising to focus on certain groups by age, gender and more, this really could become (and likely already is) a problem. I'm hopeful that the free market will balance by making it more lucrative to take the risk of advertising to groups of people that seem less interested by balancing with the reward of bringing in all the untapped potential users.
There is a Ted Talk that goes over a lot about what you are saying. https://www.ted.com/talks/reshma_saujani_teach_girls_bravery_not_perfection
She makes the point that girls are taught from a young age to not take risks while boys are talk to be dangerous and take risks. This has lead to a lot of woman taking the safe route while men take more risks which leads them to better paying jobs and control of Silicon Valley.