Crypto's Gender Gap: Can These Women Shatter the Glass Block(chain)?

Pushing for More Women in the Male-Dominated Crypto Industry

Crypto's Gender Gap: Can These Women Shatter the G...

Hong Kong – Vivien Khoo's career trajectory took a sharp turn in 2019. After a solid 19 years at Goldman Sachs, she felt the familiar tug of wanting something new, something more. Not quite ready for full-blown retirement, but definitely ready to move on from the familiar world of investment banking, she stepped down from her managing director role and landed at BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange facing a barrage of regulatory challenges. It was a bold move, to say the least.

Now, while Khoo readily admits she wasn't exactly a Crypto evangelist or blockchain die-hard, she felt her deep experience in compliance and regulation made her uniquely qualified to help navigate the exchange through a tricky period. In an interview with The Korea Times, she explained that she hoped to build a long-term career in the industry if she could just manage the transition. What struck her, though, was the sense of isolation. Gone was the vibrant network of peers she relied on at Goldman. Here, she was one of the few women in a leadership position in the then largely unregulated crypto space.

At Goldman Sachs, diversity and inclusion weren't just buzzwords; they were woven into the very fabric of the company culture. Mentorship was actively encouraged, and diversity metrics were baked into everything from recruitment to performance reviews. Khoo believes those two decades steeped in that environment fundamentally shaped her perspective.

So, it's perhaps not surprising that after a couple of years at BitMEX, Khoo has turned her attention to tackling the gender imbalance in the crypto industry. This sector, let's face it, is still very much a "boys' club," with women severely underrepresented in leadership roles and even among everyday users. According to Web3Women (W3W), only 13% of Web3 startups have a female founder, and a paltry 3% boast all-female teams. The numbers speak for themselves.

"Women's representation in financial institutions tends to taper off at senior levels," Khoo observed. "Still, the sector fares better than crypto, where the dominance of technology and trading backgrounds has traditionally limited female participation."

The good news is, Khoo sees the industry evolving and becoming more legitimate. Besides her work with W3W, she's also involved in shaping the industry from within, sitting on the Hong Kong government's Web3 task force regulatory subcommittee and stablecoin review tribunal. It's a far cry from the early days, when she recalls being told that the only people in crypto were "either on drugs or laundering something. If you were neither, then you didn't belong in the industry." It's true, the industry was simply too poorly understood. I personally felt that way.

"The industry is definitely moving from what I call an 'island business' to a more structured ecosystem," Khoo said, adding that this shift is also changing the industry's demographic makeup. In the beginning, crypto was largely driven by younger participants. When she first joined BitMEX, she found herself one of the oldest employees, surrounded by colleagues aged 17 to 35. Fortunately, that's changing too.