Muriel Médard has spent much of her career working in fields where women are a small minority. As co-founder and CEO of Optimum, she brings that experience from academia into Web3, where she believes technical excellence, diverse teams and careful scrutiny offer a better foundation for progress than hype.
Médard studied electrical engineering and mathematics at MIT, where she recalls having no female professors in the mathematics department and often being the only woman in an electrical engineering class or laboratory. Decades later, she has attended conferences in circuits and chip research where only a few percent of participants were women. The gender imbalance in Web3 is therefore familiar territory, although she does not regard that familiarity as a reason to accept it.
“My approach has been to put in the work, be collaborative, and earn regard and reputation that way. To a large extent, I have attempted to build in Web3 on what I have learnt in academia. I try to let the work speak for itself, assume that people are acting rationally and in good faith unless presented with evidence to the contrary. I strive to be collegial and supportive, and then I let the chips fall where they may.”
Meritocracy requires more than decentralisation
For Médard, the distinction between the technical architecture of Web3 and the behaviour of the people who build it is important. Decentralised systems do not automatically produce fair organisations, and an industry that describes itself as meritocratic still has to demonstrate that its decisions are based on merit.
“Decentralization is in the algorithms that power Web3, but not necessarily in the way that power dynamics emerge. I think that Web3 is torn between being indeed meritocratic, which I would argue is rational, fair and quite good for everyone, including women, and instead being beguiled by hype, which is irrational, unfair and bad for everyone, but maybe particularly women.”
She credits the success of her research and work to the strength of the diverse teams she has led. That diversity extends beyond gender and ethnicity to differences in perspective, character and ways of thinking. Engineering’s continuing lack of diversity, she argues, is a challenge for the quality of the work itself.
Her response to hype is to ask for evidence. Claims should be examined, expertise demonstrated and technical accomplishments open to scrutiny. She encourages people to distinguish between those who are genuinely interested in discussing their work and those who prefer performative conversations.
“The best remedy against irrationality is to be informed and to scrutinize. I encourage people to examine carefully, beyond the hype. Are claims backed up by careful, rigorous work? Can they be documented? In what way have people demonstrated the expertise they claim? Are they actually technically accomplished and knowledgeable? Are people excited to engage in deep conversations about their work, or do they prefer to stick with glib, performative discussions?”
Responding to challenges with facts
Médard acknowledges that her authority is regularly challenged because she is a woman, sometimes by people who are demonstrably less technically competent in the subject under discussion. Her approach is to address the substance of the disagreement rather than its possible motivation.
“My response is to counter with thoughtful, systematic arguments and facts. Even when the motivation for a challenge may be patently unfair, I believe it is important to address the issues on their logical merits alone. I seek to behave with grace and firmness.”
That emphasis on measurable results also informs her advice to women entering technical fields. She believes expertise in a specific area can provide a stronger basis for recognition, particularly where performance can be assessed impartially.
“Try to enter domains where results can speak for themselves, where you stand a better chance of being judged in a measurable, impartial, honest fashion. Logic is genderless, syllogisms are asexual.”
Trust is still a human requirement
The language of trustless systems can obscure the importance of trust between people. Médard sees no contradiction between decentralised technology and the need to build reliable relationships with colleagues, investors, partners, customers and communities. Indeed, she believes decentralised organisations may require more circles of trust than traditional top-down structures.
“Again, the trustlessness is in the algorithms, not in the relations among people. You need trust inside your company, with your investors, with your partners and customers, with your community. In many ways, the decentralized way we operate necessitates more circles of trust to be built than in a centralized, top-down setting.”
Her own approach to leadership is influenced less by gender than by being a parent. She says she can tolerate difficult treatment herself, recalling that she played rugby in college, but holds a different standard for how others should be treated.
“My values are that I seek to treat others not so much as I expect to be treated, because I can take my lumps (I was on the rugby team in college), but as I would demand that my children be treated. In my view, that treatment consists of fairness, respect and politeness. These are the values I’ve tried to build into Optimum from day one, in how we treat our team, our partners, and our community.”
Those values, she says, apply equally in grassroots communities and formal institutional settings. Representing a technology and explaining it knowledgeably to different audiences is a privilege, and women who are more conspicuous because of their under-representation may have additional opportunities to influence perceptions. She has often heard from people who remembered talks she gave years earlier.
AI, bias and the importance of verifiability
Médard’s interest in rigorous evidence extends to the relationship between AI and blockchain. She sees opportunities for the two fields to learn from each other, particularly where AI systems reproduce patterns from historical data that may contain prejudice.
In research with colleagues at Harvard and UMass, she studied teacher recommendations for advanced mathematics placement, which tended to disadvantage girls. AI trained on those decisions repeated the bias. The researchers also explored how the same mechanism could be redirected by training on the group that had received the most favourable treatment and applying that standard more broadly.
“AI trained on those biased decisions just repeats the bias. But you can flip that same mechanism to fix it: train only on the group that got the most favorable treatment, then apply that standard to everyone. Bias in training data isn’t just a flaw to correct for, it’s a lever you can redirect.”
She believes AI has a relatively higher proportion of women than some other technical domains and engages broadly with ethical questions. Web3, in turn, can contribute its emphasis on verifiability, while benefiting from the breadth of perspectives found in AI.
Mentorship as a responsibility
Mentorship has been a substantial part of Médard’s professional career. She received the Siemens Outstanding Mentor Award in 2004 for work with high school students in science and engineering, the IEEE Wyner Award in 2012 for mentoring initiatives in her professional society, and MIT’s inaugural postdoctoral association mentor award in 2022.
She regards the lack of mentoring as a significant factor discouraging under-represented groups from engineering and hopes to bring the same commitment to Web3 through collaborations, hackathons and research initiatives.
“I hope to inspire that same spirit of mentorship in Web3, through collaborations, hackathons, and initiatives that push research and development further than we could ever reach alone.”
For Médard, leadership is something to be earned through responsibility, expertise and the ability to support others. Her experience suggests that the strongest communities will be those willing to examine their own assumptions, recognise accomplishment and create opportunities for people whose perspectives have historically been under-represented.
Three tips for women entering Web3
- Build resilience. Expect challenges and develop the ability to continue working towards your goals despite them.
- Seek opportunities where results can be measured. Develop expertise in an area where your contribution can be assessed through clear, demonstrable accomplishments.
- Treat leadership as a privilege to be earned. Build the knowledge, judgement and responsibility required to lead, rather than regarding leadership as an entitlement.
