Three Women in Blockchain

Recently, the Virtual European Blockchain Convention took place, which is Europe’s leading Blockchain conference. Among many amazing speakers from various fields, there were numerous fantastic female experts. We talked to three women who took part in the Blockchain Convention and they shared thrilling insights and why we need more women in this field

The European Blockchain Convention gathers experts and leaders from various fields to share their expertise and knowledge. This year the virtual conference took place digitally, joined by over 1,500 attendees and 100 speakers. Meet three amazing women, who come from fields such as finance, health, tech, economics and more.

Mai Santamaria

Head of Financial Advisory team at Department of Finance Ireland

Mai is an accountant, she spent more than 20 years in the private insurance sector, leads financial advisory team at Department of Finance Ireland performing empirical data analysis and blockchain also falls in this category.

1. What’s the most exciting aspect of blockchain industry?

Blockchain is fascinating, the combination of cryptography and the peer to peer access to it. I come from 20 years of financial services sector, so it was something quite groundbreaking. It gave me a level of control and therefore it felt empowering to ‘discover’ blockchain. I’m still learning every day about it, it’s a journey.

2. Why is it important to bring more women into blockchain?

There should be more women everywhere, period. Not just in blockchain. That’s the reality. Now it is slowly happening. In financial services particularly, women have more work to do, speaking from my experience. Women have to break down barriers that have been there for a long time and that takes a lot of energy! So, before women even start they day-to-day tasks, they have to spend extra energy to break those barriers down. If women were part of the creation of, for example, blockchain from the start, there wouldn’t be those barriers in the first place.

3. What’s the most valuable advice you have received in your career and would like to pass on?

My former boss said to me to not listen to the voice in your head that tells you ‘You’re not good enough’ or ‘You can’t do something’, to quiet down that internal dialogue in your head that says that you only can achieve so much, because you are a woman. Do not listen to those voices. You have the power to do whatever you want to achieve. It was a very powerful advice, because I not only used it professionally, but also in my private life.

Heather Flannery

Founder & CEO, ConsenSys Health; Chair, IEEE SA P2418.6; Co-Chair, HIMSS Blockchain Task Force; Co-Founder & Chair, BiHG

Heather’s experience in the world of tech began in 1994. Currently, she and her team at ConsenSys Health are leveraging blockchain, machine learning, and advanced privacy preservation technologies. The goal is to converge these three families of emerging technologies and get them working together to integrate their force-multiplying possibilities and capabilities.

1. What’s the most exciting aspect of blockchain industry?

It’s the possibility for creating entirely new business models. We have opportunities to apply game theory and behavioral economics that are completely fascinating. And, it’s not just that we’re looking at how an emerging technology affects commerce and business, but also how it affects every aspect of a human being’s life and every sector from private citizens to governments and corporations. It gives us an opportunity to re-evaluate our structures. The entire design of the system can be rethought and reconsidered and experimented with. And that is just exhilarating!

2. Why is it important to bring more women into blockchain?

The reason we have such disparities in blockchain is because the disparities exist in the system. Of course, it’s important to resolve those inequalities. Men and women are all unique individuals. But, we do know certain things about men and women on the aggregate. And, we know that teams that are diverse, not only in gender but in age and ethnicity and religion and sexual orientation and in so many other ways, are higher performing teams. And, women have unique attributes that really help balance the situation. We tend to be incrementally less hierarchical and more inclusive in our style and strategy. We are generally more oriented around seeing partners and collaborators where others might see competitors. That particular angle is very important in blockchain because, with these new business models, we have the opportunity to elevate different aspects of business from the basis of competition. It requires us to relate to and engage with people that are in our current modality. I think women may have an easier time approaching things that way. I know many amazing women in blockchain, but they are definitely the minority. That being said, one of the things that’s great about blockchain is that there are other disciplines that are very critical to our field where women are better represented, like law for example. There are vast sweeping legal and policy and compliance matters that need to be resolved as we drive the adoption of this technology. Fortunately, there are a number of powerhouse legal minds that are women who are really contributing to that part of blockchain’s implementation.

3. What’s the most valuable advice you have received in your career and would like to pass on?

I once received advice about uncertainty in reaction to a statement I made about how really fatigued and frustrated I was during an extended period of uncertainty. At that time, I just wanted some certitude. The advice that I received was that I had to reverse my association with uncertainty. Instead of having it be a negative association that made me feel uncomfortable, I instead needed to make it into a positive association where uncertainty let me know that I was really alive. This made me willing to move into the unknown where others are also afraid, but being able to feel joyful because I have this mark of courage. There will always be so many unknowns, so I’m not waiting for them to somehow be resolved because, as soon as one is resolved, another one opens. That has been very impactful on my professional life.

Marina Niforos

NED and Board Advisor, Blockchain Economics & Governance, SDGs, Author, Speaker

Marina is an economist by training. She started her career at the World Bank; she then went over to the private sector. She worked in corporate venturing and corporate strategy. Marina was also the CEO of the American Chamber of Commerce in France and for the last five years she’s been running her own company, which is an advisory firm basing on strategy and emerging technologies. She is the lead author of the report on Blockchain Creating Opportunities for Private Enterprises and Emerging Markets.

1. What’s the most exciting aspect of blockchain industry?

I got interested in technology around 2016 when I was working with fintech companies. And my reflex is mostly as an economist, I was studying about the impact of transaction costs and the negative spillover effects of that. When I first got introduced to blockchain, I was absolutely seduced by its potential to cut down exactly that, cut down intermediaries, transaction costs and increase transparency and accountability for people. Basically, it enables a whole different economic system. I don't think we're there yet, but we've come a long way. When it comes to the European Blockchain Convention – I think it's a really unique opportunity to bring together stakeholders from absolutely any kind of interest group, with an interest in blockchain. There is corporate, there are startups, experts, universities. And it's a little bit agnostic – it's not trade specific, which allows us to come together and exchange ideas, hear about others and what they're doing.

2. Why is it important to bring more women into blockchain?

I think it's the same reason why we have to have more women in tech in general and in blockchain there's even less women than elsewhere. I did not come from STEM, I come from economics and yet I'm still in this area. So I don't think that's necessarily an obstacle. Most of the experts and economists agree that a majority of future growth of economic activity will come from digital. If women are not represented in that sector, then they're not going to be part of the economic value sharing that it is going to be contributing to. A lot of people are making more of an effort to put women in conferences, because of the optics – if you have a panel that consists of just men talking about how diversity and inclusion is important to them, it’s not going to be good enough. I've also been to private meetings like the commission or big conferences which are not so public in the media so they're not so afraid of the reputational capital. And there you see very few women actually sitting up on the stand and voicing strong opinions.

3. What’s the most valuable advice you have received in your career and would like to pass on?

I left the World Bank in a multilateral and a policymaking role to get an MBA and go into a completely different world. And it was actually a man who gave me this advice that life is not linear and plans don't always turn out to be what we expect and he encouraged me to exercise a lot of self-knowledge, resilience and not taking no for an answer. Try to play by the rules, but if they don't conform to what you need to do, then try to change them having your voice heard. You don't have to follow a particular path because everybody says this is the right thing to do.