Akasha Indream, founder of one of Telegram’s first womxn in blockchain groups, WIBI.io, speaks out on how we can engineer crypto to be inclusive by design.
“Anyone who is serious about including womxn in crypto needs to approach this challenge from a customer design perspective.”
A product designer who designs a new product has ideal customer personas they are building their product for — that product will do a job for the customer that the customer will value and pay for.
Those customer personas have a buyers journey designed for them, from product strategy, to marketing, to sales. The people who end up being our customers at startups aren’t by accident. It’s by design.
This begs the question: are cryptos platforms being designed with any womxn customer personas in mind?
If so, what is the job being done by cryptos to actually make womxn’s lives better? And is that improvement worthy of our financial investment?
Stats for womxn to men in crypto differ according to country and study, however, the best stats seem to come from America, where 13 million women might own crypto compared to 24 million men. Whereas in Europe, 1 in 5 of crypto holders are womxn according to cointelegraph.
In light of this, Andreas M. Antonopoulos’ recent Twitter request for non-CIS white male podcasts to feature on seems (at least to me) fairly reasonable, from the perspective of wanting to encourage more general adoption outside of the existing self-referential communities.
At least one-third of womxn who are college-educated women do not believe they have equal access to the financial system according to a Coinbase report.
I have greater trouble understanding the Twitter storm that resulted, backed by the philosophical basis that “tech is gender agnostic” or that “when crypto is widely adopted, both genders will hold crypto equally.”
As a female abundance and branding strategist with experience in digital transformation stretching back 20 years, and a background in human-centered design, I know it’s not womxn here who are the problem.
Womxn adopted the internet just fine, thanks. And smartphones. We do online banking, and we even send emails.
Firstly, tech always has a purpose. From the humble hammer to the advanced satellite, tech inherently has to be designed to be fit for purpose. Or it’s not tech. It’s art.
Secondly, I want to call out the myth that inclusivity will happen because of adoption. Adoption happens because of inclusivity, not in spite of it.
I’m going to say that again. Adoption happens because of inclusivity, not in spite of it
Looking back in time, if something starts out not being inclusive, then it’s a struggle that goes on for decades, or centuries, to bring inclusivity back into the equation. Or the pay gap wouldn’t exist, and there’d be equal representation of womxn in education, the C-suite and in government.
“To date, there is still a 31.4% average gender gap that remains to be closed globally.”“Projecting current trends into the future, the overall global gender gap will close in 99.5 years, on average, across the 107 countries covered continuously since the first edition of the report.” — Global Gender Gap Report 2020
This projection comes from a fairly hefty 300-page report, and any kind of summary here will do it an injustice. However, the sheer fact that it predicts that it will take a century to reach gender parity globally indicates the scale of the entrenched challenges we are facing.
The financial world is evolving. Due to blockchain, it is decentralizing. But if it’s mostly men who own crypto, are we then at risk of this skewed adoption of a new financial asset class actually maintaining or even increasing global gender disparity?
If the technology does anything less than close the gender gap, how can we claim crypto is a democratizing influence for good at all?
For crypto, being inclusive is inextricable from its core value proposition. Built into its system is the expectation of decentralization and the equal distribution of power. If crypto doesn’t achieve this — and I would argue it can’t if it’s not inclusive — then it is an ideological failure and a mere plaything of the current technologically and financially literate.
Inclusivity from the start, by design, can make adoption much, much faster.
Without it, ubiquitous adoption may not happen in any reasonable time frame if at all.
Crypto may simply die and fade away if its power to democratize is slower than the rate of global gender equality. Why would anyone choose it as an asset class, if, 100 years from now, gender parity was reached in all other areas? It would slide away into obscure meaninglessness.
I could wax lyrical about the hows and whys that the imbalances in finance and tech have played forward to manifest in cryptos — which lies at the intersection of the two — but really my intention here is to shine a light on how, if you want to, you can help make cryptos more inclusive here and now.
If you are a crypto founder, as a brand and CMX strategist I can say that it’s in your long-term interest to make your crypto platform inclusive.
If you don’t plan at the beginning to include, attract — and keep — both genders, then you are missing out on 50% of your potential market: that’s a pretty risky decision to take in a highly competitive, disruptive tech world.
Unless you have a product that is intentionally marketed towards only males (e.g. men’s health), it’s much easier to design an attractive customer experience for your ideal womxn customer personas from the start. (Even men’s health products may sometimes be bought by the womxn who care for them!)
Here are my ten top suggestions.
1. Include womxn in your founding team
Womxn advisors aren’t enough. You need womxn on your core team involved in your customer experience design, who can tell you whether your platform is going to be relevant to 50% of the population or not.
Don’t have a woman on your core team? Reach out to me as a design consultant.
2. Support your womxn founders
It’s far better to know about your platforms weaknesses whilst you are in still design stage rather than after you launch.
The womxn on your founding team need to feel secure enough in their tenure to speak out and call you out if your platform design isn’t inclusive or attractive enough to womxn.
Do have their position supported by the correct legal documentation and culture that let them know that they won’t be punished for playing the messenger.
3. Deliver a product that solves womxn’s problems
Does your platform actually solve real-life “hair on fire” kind of problems that womxn have as well as men?
The challenges womxn face often have to do with caring for multiple people on a stretched budget with little time and a lack of priority for self-care. How does your platform make life easier specifically for womxn?
4. Make womxn care about your platform
You’ve built a platform, and maybe you even solve some womxn-centric problems, but are you communicating it in a way that womxn connect with? Are you speaking their language of values? Collaboration? Connection?
5. Design your marketing funnels for womxn
If you want to attract womxn customers, you need an irresistible offer in your marketing funnels that specifically attracts this ideal customer persona.
What do womxn actually need and value that you have to offer? Don’t know? Better ask a consultant!
If you want a 50/50 gender balance on your platform, you may need to do something extra special that specifically attracts womxn customers and gives them an irresistible offer to give your platform a try for the first time.
6. Be where the womxn are
Think about your customers and leverage partnerships with organizations and businesses who potentially have the same ideal customer demographic as you do.
If, for example, you are a crypto business platform, partner with womxn business organizations and put on a special crypto event. If you are a music crypto platform, give away cryptos with downloads of female music artists. If you are a health platform, put a QR code on a womxn’s health product (e.g. tampons) that incentivizes adoption.
The possibilities are limitless.
7. Include womxn in your branding
This one is pretty simple. If you have a website or social media, and it is all about the male founders or male tech leaders, you need to rethink your brand strategy. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many startups I’ve seen who don’t prioritise this kind of optics.
So, go back to the design board, work out who your ideal customers are, and then include photos of those kinds of people on your brand touchpoints — from both genders.
8. Do actual customer research surveys
Get some people from your product strategy team on the streets doing surveys, and ask both men and womxn vox pop what they might find attractive or unattractive about your platform and why.
If you are getting a very disparate result between the genders, ask specific questions to try and pinpoint the issue behind the gap so your UX team can remedy it.
9. Bring womxn tech founders into your token ecosystem
If you don’t just have a platform but a whole ecosystem, look for great new tech platforms founded by womxn for womxn and support them being brought into your token ecosystem and incentivized with crypto.
There are still plenty of tech platforms being built by womxn for womxn — e.g. femtech — and with the right kind of support, these can be incentivized with crypto.
It also helps womxn founders who otherwise only seem to access 2% of VC funding.
10. Support inclusive events
If you are being invited to speak on a panel at an event, and there isn’t 50/50 gender representation, either ask them to change it or don’t speak.
It shouldn’t be the responsibility of womxn in the blockchain and crypto groups having to get together and protest yet another male-dominated panel.
If you are sponsoring an event, put 50/50 representation into your sponsorship agreement.
Most of what exists in this world in terms of institutions and structures have been designed by men — for men. It wasn’t necessarily done intentionally — but a natural bi-product of not including womxn in the design process. This is a legacy of the hundreds of years that womxn couldn’t own property, make contracts, work or vote.
This invisible bias in design became apparent to me when I worked in mobility — e.g. the public transport system was designed to transport people in a linear fashion when womxn (who are often carers) often have to make multiple stops and travel in batches, not a straight line.
Most of our economic, political, and health systems also are designed for people who don’t have the everyday responsibility of balancing care for self with care for others. I just completed a 40-day online summit around the issue of women’s health, it was a revelation how many of the legacy systems still causing friction for female consumers were caused by institutions being designed by and for male “experts”.
If womxn aren’t involved at the start in the design, then an inherent bias develops that may remain invisible until it manifests in the results — as it is in the adoption statistics of crypto.
Cryptos just aren’t another form of disembodied currency — they are a sign of adoption of the tech platforms behind them. If womxn don’t want crypto, really what they don’t want is the poorly designed tech platform that doesn’t solve any of their needs.
Anyone who is serious about including womxn in crypto needs to approach this challenge from a customer design perspective: Who is the customer here? How do we speak to their values? How do we design products that make their lives better?
Is crypto making womxn's lives easier by doing the jobs for them that they need doing? Apparently not yet. If it did, more womxn would be using it in their everyday lives.
To not design for womxn customers is a major fatal flaw for any tech company offering a transactional product in a fast-moving, competitive and disruptive world.
In fact, it’s a fatal flaw in a world that is moving towards the value of gender parity. It means that, even before you have launched, you are legitimately obsolete and ready to be thrown aside to make way for technology that better fits with a global paradigm.
A global paradigm of equality and democracy that crypto helped awaken — but to date wasn’t consistent enough in its dedication to creating it.