Susan Drenth: Web3 may be decentralised, but opportunity still isn’t
Web3 likes to think of itself as a meritocracy, a world where traditional hierarchies are dismantled and people are judged on what they contribute rather than who they are. For Susan Drenth, founder of the Girls in Crypto Foundation, that promise is real, but it comes with an important qualification.
Decentralisation may create new opportunities for women, she argues, but it cannot magically remove the social and economic barriers that determine who feels able to enter the industry in the first place.
“I do not see the current male dominance of Web3 leadership as proof that Web3 has failed as a truly decentralised experiment,” she says. “Rather, it raises the question of who is encouraged to enter these spaces in the first place.”
Drenth points to the public perception of Web3 as closely associated with cryptocurrency, financial speculation, technical complexity and risk. Women, meanwhile, can be socialised to see themselves as more risk-averse and may receive less encouragement to enter financial or technology-related careers.
The result is a distinction she believes matters. A decentralised system can theoretically offer equal opportunities to the people participating in it while the society surrounding that system continues to influence who gets through the door.
“A system can offer equal possibilities once someone enters it while still being surrounded by social structures that determine who feels able, welcome, or equipped to enter at all,” she says.
Girls in Crypto Foundation
It is part of the thinking behind the Girls in Crypto Foundation, which Drenth founded to raise awareness of the position of women, particularly marginalised women, within Web3.
Her own experience of the sector has given her examples of both its possibilities and its contradictions.
Drenth recalls joining the Telegram group of an unnamed crypto project and being greeted with sexist stickers and comments. When somebody spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about the project was told by another investor, “Let’s not be a woman for a second,” her response was immediate.
“I took my money out that same second and left the group.”
Yet she has experienced the opposite reaction too. While co-developing a crypto project, Drenth participated in its first AMA and says the market capitalisation rose by around 15% when she began speaking.
“The only lesson I can take from that is that, for whatever reason, people seemed to trust the project more when a woman was speaking instead of a man.”
That contradiction has followed her experience of Web3. Being a woman has helped her form strong relationships with other women in the industry, but the anonymity and lack of central authority in decentralised communities can also provide cover for behaviour that would be more easily challenged in a conventional organisation.
Warmth is not incompetence
Leadership has presented a different challenge.
Drenth points to the tension identified in Susan Fiske’s Stereotype Content Model between perceptions of warmth and competence, something she recognises from her own professional encounters.
“I can’t really hold myself back from smiling or wanting the general atmosphere to be light and breezy,” she says.
Combined with her youth and enthusiasm, however, she has noticed that this can sometimes prompt people to tell her to “be realistic”, even when there is no reason to believe she hasn’t already considered the issues being raised.
It is a compromise she is unwilling to make.
“I don’t think I should have to become less warm, less enthusiastic, or less myself in order to prove that I am competent.”
There is a wider lesson in that for female leadership. Drenth accepts that she cannot control whether other people mistake kindness, openness, curiosity or femininity for naivety. What she can control is her own response.
“I know that I am competent. I know that I am realistic.”
And she believes visibility matters. The more women continue to enter and remain in the sector, the easier it becomes for the next woman to imagine herself there.
“Just because the industry is male-dominated today does not mean it is destined to remain that way forever.”
You don’t have to be a developer
One barrier Drenth would particularly like to dismantle is the assumption that a career in Web3 necessarily means learning to code.
Her own route into the industry was anything but conventional. Her partner introduced her to Web3 while they were both students working a part-time job. He would spend quiet periods looking at Dexscreener while she would draw.
One day he suggested that they might create a project together, with Drenth producing the original artwork.
At the time she was studying for a master’s degree in International Relations and, as she puts it, had “barely passed my economics test during my bachelor’s”.
The proposed meme coin never happened, but her interest in Web3 did.
She subsequently wanted to research the potential use of Web3 in development aid, only to discover how little academic work existed on the subject and how difficult it was to find someone prepared to supervise it. Eventually she found a professor willing not only to support the research but to accept that there were aspects of the emerging technology that the student might understand better than the academic.
That experience has influenced how Drenth thinks women might enter the industry today.
Not everybody will discover Web3 through crypto trading, Discord or Telegram, and nor should they have to. She wants to see it become more visible within international development, law, public policy, communications, finance, art and academic research.
“If you want to learn how to code or become a developer, that’s amazing,” she says. “But if you’d rather become a public affairs specialist, regulatory expert, communications specialist, researcher, or something completely different, those opportunities are there too.”
There is no single route in because the sector itself is still being constructed.
“We need more smart, capable, and innovative women in every corner of this space. There is still so much room to shape what this sector will become, so get in there before it’s filled to the brim.”
Building bridges
Drenth also sees a potential leadership role for women in connecting two parts of Web3 that can sometimes appear far removed from one another: grassroots decentralised communities and the increasingly formal world of institutions and regulation.
She began on the grassroots side herself and found the route into institutional circles difficult to navigate. There is no obvious spokesperson for a decentralised ecosystem, she points out, and often no clear bridge between the people using these technologies and those making decisions about their future.
Her conversations with women in Nigeria have reinforced her belief in the potential of decentralisation to circumvent some of the structures that traditionally limit people’s economic opportunities.
Women, she believes, can play an important role in making sure those experiences travel in the other direction too — from grassroots communities into the rooms where regulation and policy are being shaped.
“I’ve found that women in this space often connect easily with one another and place a strong emphasis on community, trust, and connectivity,” she says.
Rather than treating the institutional and decentralised sides of Web3 as competing worlds, Drenth wants to see women helping to connect them.
From blockchain to AI
That need for female voices is becoming more pressing as Web3 increasingly intersects with artificial intelligence.
Drenth is concerned that AI systems trained on enormous quantities of human-created data can reproduce the prejudices contained within that data. She points to recruitment as one example: if historical employment data reflects workplaces in which men were disproportionately represented or successful, an AI system trained on those patterns can learn the bias rather than eliminate it.
For that reason, she argues that women cannot be invited into discussions about AI ethics after systems have already been designed.
“Female perspectives need to be part of AI development and governance from the beginning, rather than brought in afterwards to fix problems that could have been prevented.”
It is an argument that brings Drenth back to the central challenge facing women in Web3. Opening the door is important, but so is ensuring women arrive early enough to influence what is being built.
For all the sexism she has encountered, she remains optimistic about decentralisation’s potential. It offers, she believes, the possibility of systems in which geography, sex, race and social background become less important than what somebody does and contributes.
Technology cannot erase inequality on its own. Women still need access, education, confidence and often capital before they can participate. But reducing those barriers could allow people to circumvent some of the structures that have traditionally determined whose ideas are heard and whose work is rewarded.
And that, Drenth says, “is exactly why the Girls in Crypto Foundation was formed.”
Susan Drenth’s three tips for women who want to lead in Web3
1. Create your own opportunity.
Web3 is still young enough that the job you want may not exist yet. “You don’t necessarily have to fit into an existing role,” she says. “The role you are looking for might not even exist yet.”
2. Don’t hide who you are or what you stand for.
Drenth advises women not to mould themselves into somebody else’s idea of a leader. “Find that path, even if it looks different from everyone else’s, and build something that makes you happy.”
3. DM people on LinkedIn.
Her final piece of advice is pleasingly practical. Find somebody doing the job you would love to have and simply ask them how they got there. “You lose absolutely nothing by asking, and you might gain a connection that completely changes your path.”
This one feels particularly strong for the series because Susan doesn’t give us the predictable “Web3 is male dominated and needs more women” answer. Her argument that decentralisation may be relatively meritocratic once you’re inside, while inequality affects who gets inside in the first place, gives the article something to think about rather than simply something to celebrate.
