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Bitcoin developers prefer to be judged by the quality of their work, not by their sex.
However, some female developers have found it difficult to find their place within the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Few know this better than Lorraine Marcel, founder of Bitcoin Dada and Dada Devs (“Dada” is Swahili for “sister.”)
The former is a Bitcoin education program for African women with both virtual and in-person components, while the latter is a non-profit dedicated to training, supporting and mentoring female African software engineers who aspire to work on Bitcoin and Lightning Network projects.
“Representation really matters,” Marcel told me in an interview.
“People often look for spaces where they can relate to those around them, and that has not always been easy in Bitcoin, where the early developers and most prominent voices were predominantly white men,” she added.
According to Marcel, women—especially African women—often ask themselves questions such as “Do I really belong in this space?” or “Will people really care what I have to contribute?”
Marcel believes wholeheartedly that African women should, in fact, be contributing to Bitcoin projects if they have the engineering chops and has made it her personal mission to make space for them via Dada Devs.
Dada Devs: A Sanctuary For Female African Bitcoin Developers
Dada Devs was born from a need that Marcel had taken note of while running Bitcoin Dada.
She recounted how a number of software developers had joined Bitcoin Dada and felt that they wanted to put their engineering skills to work on Bitcoin projects.
At first, she guided them to programs hosted by Chaincode Labs, a Bitcoin research and development center, and Btrust, a program designed to support open-source developers in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
While the women appreciated Marcel’s guidance, they also made it clear that they were looking for something a bit more tailored to their needs.
“They would come back and say, ‘Yeah, okay, those programs are good, and it’s not that we don’t know that these pathways exist, but we want something that is specifically for African females, just like Bitcoin Dada,’” said Marcel.
“It became clear that there was no dedicated space within the Bitcoin ecosystem designed for these women, and I wanted to help them create a foundation where they could develop skills with confidence, support, and continuity,” she added.
“Dada Devs functions as an incubation environment where women identify problems within their own contexts and build practical Bitcoin- and Lightning-based solutions for their communities.”
A few women in the program have already created minimum viable products, which they’re planning to launch in February. Two of the female engineers have also recently taken on full-time work on Bitcoin projects.
And what was originally just a virtual space for these women is about to extend into a physical one.
“We are in the process of establishing a physical hub in Kenya to support consistent, in-person collaboration among women builders,” said Marcel. “The initiative is currently in its fundraising phase, with a targeted launch in late February.”
Marcel also shared with me that she learned at last year’s Africa Bitcoin Conference that it isn’t only African women who feel intimidated by getting involved in Bitcoin projects. Women from all over the world have similar apprehensions, as well.
“We organized a workshop at the conference for women building in Bitcoin called ‘Women Building the Future,’” said Marcel.
“We had women of every race attend, and all of the stories they shared were similar—they felt left out, sidelined, and that they had to work harder to be seen,” she added.
One of the attendees of that workshop—Lisa Neigut (who goes by “Nifty Nei” in Bitcoin circles), a Lightning Network developer and founder of the bitcoin++ conference and the Base58 Bitcoin protocol school—sees eye-to-eye with Marcel in that women often have to surmount more hurdles in making an effort to work as developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Perspective From A Seasoned Female Bitcoin Developer
Neigut began contributing to Core Lightning, an implementation of the Lightning Network, in 2018.
She attributes her breaking into the Bitcoin space with relative ease to a combination of luck and being at the right place at the right time.
She also told me in an interview that she had an “incredible champion and mentor” in the much respected open-source developer Rusty Russell, her boss at Blockstream, a Bitcoin infrastructure company.
However, Neigut stated that her situation was unique.
“Only a few of us like myself were encouraged by mentors we found—accidentally or otherwise,” said Neigut.
“If you look historically at how and why women got into working on bitcoin development, the one constant is there was a man who encouraged and supported her being there,” she added. “Most of the early ones I know were in a romantic relationship at the time with a developer who was passionate about Bitcoin.”
She believes that, for women female developers to come into and stay in the Bitcoin space, they need to be encouraged and supported, especially by other female developers.
Neigut cited the work that Amiti Uttarwar, the first confirmed female Bitcoin Core developer, is doing to support women in the space.
“Amiti has basically retired from coding and has dedicated herself to providing effective mentorship to anyone working in bitcoin through her non-profit Waye,” Neigut said.
“Most of her biggest successes have been keeping women from abandoning their work in Bitcoin,” she added.
She concluded by saying in jest that, if women don’t support one another, “we’ll just have to get every masculine bitcoin developer a code-talented girlfriend.”
Judging Female Bitcoin Developers By Their Work
While some female Bitcoin developers find it challenging to find their place in the Bitcoin ecosystem, they simply want to be judged by the quality of their work once they do.
Both Lorraine Marcel and “Satsie,” founder of the Bitcoin Dev Project, a program that provides free and open-source tools for those interested in contributing to Bitcoin development, harped on this point.
“Female Bitcoin developers want to be judged by their merit and their code alone—and at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that should matter,” Satsie told me in an interview.
She also noted that a number of women contribute code under “nyms,” short for “pseudonyms,” in part because they want privacy and in part because they feel the quality of the code they contribute should speak for itself.
With that said, Satsie also mentioned she personally feels more comfortable in rooms filled with Bitcoin developers where some of them are women and believes that it helps to have diversity in the Bitcoin development space so that Bitcoin apps are designed by, and therefore more appealing to, members of both sexes.
“If we have a more diverse group of people developing on Bitcoin, we are going to just naturally have more diverse, robust solutions that can help make Bitcoin easier to use for everyone,” said Satsie.
But, in closing, she stressed once more how important it is that women are judged by their work alone—and not by their sex.
“It should be equal opportunity, not equal outcome,” said Satsie.