Female Entrepreneurship in the NFT Space - Sophia Adampour

hello everyone thank you for showing up here and all kudos to harmony one and her daughter for enabling young women to attend this conference and ensuring diversity um thanks to them i'm standing here today and giving this talk about female entrepreneurship in the nft space and english is my fourth language so i'm gonna use some flashcards so sorry about that i'm just gonna mention that in the beginning um this talk highlights several points that demonstrate why the work of those these organizations is so crucial now that we're building the future of web 3. today in web 3 the builders are mostly men the users are mostly men and owners are mostly men if web 3 is our future a look at the dangers and the shortcomings of a male-dominated world becomes obvious the dangers of lacking representation can never be emphasized enough as a few examples let's let's like let's let's have a look at how the physical world is tailored to men and how it can be inefficient and lacking because of this as of now we have an imperfect facial recognition technology which is less effective at identifying people of color and women in comparison to caucasian male men this technology depends on algorithms to make facial matches and those algorithms are more robust for male caucasian faces than other any other group this is because the databases contain more data on cancer men caucasian men than women and people of color and this as we know creates unintentional biases and is a threat to security and freedom i can have several i can literally open my mom's metamask and have done this several times as women of color okay cool are those with the highest rate rates of false positives the lack of female representation when it comes to product design also put lives at risk and now and this is really important to emphasize now that we're creating products of the web3 another example can be how safety futures in cars tailored for men and in that way are causing are ensuring that women when they are involved in car crashes are 40 percent for seven percent more likely to be seriously injured and 17 more likely to lose their lives and this is because once we started to create the designs for these it was men who were involved and we've been trying we've been trying to combat these statistics for decades but it's really hard when the foundation has been set now let's have a look at facebook or meta as they unfortunately changed their name to which is one of the leading forces in web 2 and are betting hard on the metaverse the lack of understanding of diverse needs was witnessed in facebook's metaverse platform when female avatars experienced experienced being harassed within the 31st minutes they were on the platform facebook or meta stated that open standards privacy and safety needs to be built into the metawars from day one and that you really want to emphasize these principles from the start this was not accomplished and is really unfortunate as we're trying to involve a part of a portion of the society who now might be more hesitant to take part take as they have experienced that this space may not be free from violence these are instances of how the world as we know it today is built by men and for when for men women are not even taken into consideration with which reveals the extent to which they are not present in the process of building the structures of society and this has been proven to be inefficient and even deadly for women and now we're unfortunately witnessing the same unfortunate pattern once it comes to the metaverse and digital world asean here i don't know as a owner of a physical nft gallery i'm really up to date with what's going on in the nft marketplaces and it's really common to see that the floor nfts of different avatars are usually those with darker pixels or female traits so it's kind of indicating who's in the market right now as most people want to have an avatar that represents them themselves and that this is a pattern that's been going on for a long time um men are likely men are leading the way when it comes to metalworks and if women don't begin to have a say in the creation process the inequality and patriotical norms are doomed to be in our dream to infect the digital world as well and we did have a panel discussion at harmony once women in the web 3 event earlier this week and what some of those amazing panelists also mentioned that this is not a picket man at all it's a pick at women web 3 is one of the most open and friendly spaces to create and that it's where true equality really is guaranteed as you can stay anonymous and no one will know your gender when you're creating a company or likewise the web 3 is and when it comes to nft sales 16 of these are go are going to women so they are benefiting from the nft art market marketplace way much more than the fine art market where they only stand for two percent of the annual sales so this is something we as a gallery is really happy about but again sixteen percent is a lot more than two percent but it still is not equal to the portion the female portion of the population which is fifteen percent so we shouldn't be celebrating too early so what we've done at worst gallery is trying to combat as someone who has a degree in civil engineering and cultural studies i've been really curious about how to engage more people that look like me and it hasn't worked being really technical this way so far so since 2019 i tried to create a space where we could meet until now it's only been facebook groups like hey come over on lunch and we can talk about blockchain or we can talk about crypto or um since 2020 it was nfts and the people that usually would meet up were men and i ended up trying to search for funding to create a gallery for nfts as a way to include people that might have not been included subconsciously so what we have written outside of the gallery is verse gallery and the people that come by have might never heard of an nft before but the second they leave the place they're convinced that they should partake in this market and be more educated so that's really rewarding we didn't even market our opening but 170 people showed up we're only having posters around the city saying welcome to the metaverse and it was a qr code saying the day and the address and even the prime minister at the time of norway came by and that's something she was open and honest about that this would be something that she would never be involved in um she um if it wasn't for a physical space that kind of invited her in and yeah we do see a large portion of men here as well but for me it's still a win because one female ended up one female ended up coming to the board apr club no it was several more inside but on this picture and that's one female more than i've previously talked about nfts with so yeah again when in five years when web3 is more integrated we should not have no right to say that web3 was sexist as we mentioned that it's open for everyone to partake and find information about but also it's the people that are privileged enough to take to spend time on it and go maybe go to a gallery that will learn about it so a challenge we're still facing is how to involve a broader aspect and that's by having educational talks about the dangers so we're having until now we have been having events with samsung who are now coming out with crypto friendly products we've been having talk events with ledger about the security of nfts and we've been having git coin and we're going to host near prodigal as well all in the duration of three months and the only thing that stopped us from doing this back in 2019 was being financed no one wanted to finance something that hadn't were crypto in it and especially not a 22 year old young woman coming in and saying that this is something that we should create in order to have more people partaking in space but as soon as we open up our doors and the news outlets as we saw in the same that's on the national news as well as soon as they came by all the investors are coming the banks are coming and asking how to be a part of this and how they can invest so it's really important to see that someone has to take the risk beforehand all alone until others take part and want to be in it but again that's something about human nature as well that we don't want to be the one who takes the first step and it's easier to take that step once you've seen someone else do it and that's what we're proud to be we're proud to do that to be those who take the first step and in order for others to be able to take that first step it's really important to finance them and coming from norway one of the nordic countries who are regarded as the most progressive countries only 1.3 percent of risk capital goes to female entrepreneurs so it's it scares me to think about what the number is other places thank you [Applause]