Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark has announced a scholarship for female blockchain developers, in a bid to encourage more women to enter the crypto space and reduce gender inequality. The crypto turf has been seen as man’s world since its inception, despite the fact several crypto giants are run by women.
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In an initiative to bring more women to the male-dominated space, Stark and bitcoin developer Jimmy Song have put out several scholarship packages for the forthcoming two-day interactive “programming blockchain seminar”. The blockchain seminar is slated for May 17th and 18th in New York City.
Stark Blockchain Scholarship Worth $4,000
On April 24th, 2018, Stark tweeted “Hey female developers, Want to build the future of bitcoin and cryptocurrency? @jimmysong and I organized scholarships for women for his awesome Programming Blockchain seminar, May 17-18 in NYC.”
Hey female developers 👋,
Want to build the future of bitcoin and cryptocurrency? @jimmysong and I organized scholarships for women for his awesome Programming Blockchain seminar, May 17-18 in NYC. 👩🏻💻👩💻👩🏾💻
Apply here and spread the word: https://t.co/VSOwdWwigE
— elizabeth stark 🌋 (@starkness) April 24, 2018
The scholarship will foot the bill for the two-day course, which otherwise costs $4,000. Although, scholarship recipients will have to bear the travel cost to New York. The scholarship form is available here. The application form has a section where women developers are required to solve a programming challenge.
Stark’s blockchain program scholarship is not the first initiative to encourage more women to participate in the blockchain sphere. Crypto industry leaders like Bitfury, Digital Currency Group, and Overstock have also shown support for workshops that introduce the revolutionary technology to women.
Crypto Space’s Underlying Weakness – The Gender Gap
According to some, lack of female participation is one of the key weaknesses of the crypto space. Gender inequality, they say, is something that needs to be considered more seriously for the sake of the advancement of the crypto world. Despite this, very few have actually addressed the issue and most don’t even realize that gender gap exists.
The blockchain/crypto space is male dominated, yet now more women are visible taking an active interest in the subject. According to coin.dance statistics, women only make up about 5 percent of the community. However Stark considers the gender gap in the crypto space may not be as bad as it seems.
At the start of the year, Stark expressed her disapproval of the coin.dance data via another tweet. She said there is a number of analytics tools that survey women’s participation in the crypto space and all differ greatly.
Luckily @eiaine has already refuted this data. Tl;dr it’s not accurate.https://t.co/xlY8aYqhyG
— elizabeth stark 🌋 (@starkness) January 5, 2018
Is it possible to balance the gender inequality in the crypto space? Share your views in the comments section.
Images via Pixabay
