The emergence of Web3 and Metaverse concepts has created an opportunity for women to “level the playing field early on,” a Dubai artist said, urging more women to take an active part in shaping the future of web.
Currently, the biggest Metaverse platforms – Fortnite, Roblox, Sandbox, Decentraland, and Meta – are all led by white men. Recent estimate also suggests that in the crypto scene, only 5 percent of companies are led by women.
“The digital space has always had room for improvement when it came to equal representation and opportunity,” Kristel Bechara (below), a Dubai-based artist who has recently been known as the first female Arab artist to launch a non-fungible token (NFT) from the UAE.
Both the Metaverse and crypto spaces share this gender imbalance with the broader technology scene, where women are also severely underrepresented. In Europe for instance, women hold only 17 percent of major tech jobs, and even future hiring pools tend to be male-dominated.
According to Bechara, the advent of the Metaverse could be “invaluable opportunity to level the playing field early on and ensuring that we set a foundation that combats any unfair barriers of entry to the industry.”
“We need to have women actively joining the Metaverse and becoming vital to its advancement and growth, in order to ensure that the platform keeps on evolving while remaining inclusive of its female userbase,” she explained.
Mohamed Al Fayed (below), a tech entrepreneur and the co-founder of GrubTech, emphasized the need for diversity as the new web concepts are being shaped, “to ensure that we have equal representation of beliefs, thoughts, gender biases, and the likes of,” he told Arabian Business.
“As the Metaverse is almost certain to be a big pillar of how we interact with each other across borders and different topics, getting the widest gamut of opinions and thoughts from our biases, whether from our nationalities, gender, or religion, is critical and will help shape a more diverse and inclusive Metaverse,” he explained.
In the region, “there is still plenty of room for women to participate and capitalize on this opportunity,” NFT artist Bechara said, noting how there’s a need for “an active campaign to raise awareness of the advantages and possibilities of this new emerging technology, which is specifically geared towards women.”
She added: “The industry itself needs to ensure that the Metaverse is a safe space for women to join and contribute without being subject to any unpleasant experiences.”
Creators vs engineers
Reports suggest that much of the fight for women inclusion in Web 3 is not so much about fielding more female engineers to work on the technology infrastructure, but more as content creators.
Women are advancing faster on this front, with female-led Metaverse companies like Everyrealm, which has holdings in 27 Metaverse platforms, growing bigger as the technology further develops.
The distinction could be less important in Web 3 where technical skills aren’t central to the ability to participate, but the Dubai NFT artist said the technology is constantly evolving and women must keep up with the updates “to maximise what it has to offer to us.”
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