Part of Decential Media’s celebration and recognition of Women’s History month

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As industry folks recoup from ETHDenver, contact lists brimming with potential investors and founders, the working moms in crypto missed out. For the default parents, it’s not as easy to jump on a plane for a quick four-day trip to Denver. Motherhood, like crypto, is 24/7. Something has to give. 

The pace and pressure of the space, the late-night parties, the bad rap, the vibes and verbiage, and the long-standing problems of diversity in tech, makes it hard for new moms to keep up in web3. 

Margaret Gabriel, a new mom and also the head of talent at crypto venture capital firm CoinFund, is concerned that web3 is becoming more insular as the space is maturing. She fears women aren’t joining the industry and are missing out as both employees and investors.

“Men are creating both the majority of the crypto ideas and building out teams, as well as voting with their capital about which ones are going to get funding,” Gabriel said to me in a recent interview.  Leading CoinFund’s culture initiatives, as well as coaching the people behind their portfolio companies, led Gabriel to discover the lack of women investors, founders or female-led teams, especially those who are also mothers. 

Not enough female investors and VCs 

Gabriel’s interest in financial inclusion started during her time at Google, where she was introduced to the world of restricted stock units (RSUs). Realizing she was afraid of investing, Gabriel and her female colleagues created a monthly meet-up to talk about finances. It was here she was told to learn about “this Bitcoin thing,” by a woman who had been an early investor. 

This colleague later left Google for Gemini, and Gabriel followed. 

“I had a good thing going at Google, but I knew I probably wouldn’t get another chance to build a crypto company,” she said. “If I knew so little about traditional investing, I realized even fewer women probably knew about crypto, which I wanted to change.” 

Read more: Sandy Carter, An Unstoppable Woman in Web3 

After four years at Gemini where she helped the cryptocurrency exchange grow from 100 to 900 staff, Gabriel was offered the role at CoinFund. “I had never thought of venture capital as a place I could live in, which was just another bias,” she said. She was 12 weeks pregnant when she accepted the role. 

Exclusivity evolving into exclusion 

Gabriel is also worried more hurdles are being created with the vocabulary, expectations of experience, and peacocking that go on in the industry, which only adds to the barriers to entry for women. 

“It’s become less of a place where we say, ‘hey come and learn,’ and much more like ‘if you don’t know what an L3 is, you can’t interview with us,’” she said. 

The expectation of experience has changed since Gabriel joined the industry in 2018. Candidates are required to have deep web3 experience now, and not just be “crypto curious,” which Gabriel believes is a further barrier to entry. Of the courses with blockchain majors in college, few women are likely enrolled – mirroring the lack of female representation in STEM. 

Not a knock on men 

Gabriel believes men can be advocates, not adversaries. She used the example of the unconscious bias that played out at Google when they were building the YouTube app. YouTube had customers coming back saying their videos were upside down and they couldn’t figure out why. They later learned it was because these people were left-handed and held their phones differently. It was missed because they had no left-handed engineers on the team.  

Read all of Decential Media’s Women’s History month coverage

“It’s the same issue in web3,” Gabriel said. “It’s not that men are trying to exclude women or building products that are exclusionary. They’re the right-handed engineers who don’t even see the problem because it’s not their worldview.” 

Diversity and inclusion must be made a business priority, not a nice-to-have idea, she added. 

While the burden of change often falls on the underrepresented, Gabriel believes men are willing partners and it’s important for women to open up about their lives outside of work. 

“We’re still so early in the industry,” she said. “It’s ostensibly a technology that was built off this concept of creating a more egalitarian movement that gives people back their power, but ironically it’s creating a more exclusive culture.”