Sandy Carter, An Unstoppable Woman in Web3
About 11 percent of web3 founders are female
Part of Decential Media’s celebration and recognition of Women’s History month
As Vice President at Amazon Web Services, Sandy Carter was assigned the task of identifying how their customers were using blockchain. This took her down the proverbial web3 rabbit hole, where she quickly fell in love with its promise.
Primed by her nearly two decades at Amazon and IBM, Carter quickly learned to obsess over customer service while turning to tech to solve problems. Moonlighting in metaverse side gigs led to a dinner with the CEO of Unstoppable Domains and a memorable conversation about digital identity that culminated in a formal career move across to web3 as chief operating officer at Unstoppable. Amid her string of successes in emerging tech, Carter is now trying to tackle the biggest challenge of her career: equal representation for women in the industry.
Equal representation in emerging tech
Only 22 percent of people who work in AI are women. About 11 percent of web3 founders are female and the overall number of women in crypto sits at 8 percent. The problem isn’t new – more broadly, women hold approximately 20 percent of tech roles.
“We know that when you have a diverse team it has a big impact because what you’re going to do requires innovation,” Carter said to me recently. “If you have people with different mindsets asking questions, you’re going to have a better source of ideas and the ability to hit different marketplaces.”
Women enter emerging tech later than men, partly because women don’t take risks as often as men. It’s why Carter started Unstoppable Women of Web3, a community where young girls and women connect and learn from leading web3 founders. “If you can see it, you can be it,” she said. “Visibility is powerful.”
A quick look at industry events or public education makes the problem clear. “If you look at ETHDenver, it’s mostly male speakers,” Carter said. “If you look at computer science teachers in high schools, it’s predominantly men. It’s why we started the top 100 most inspirational women in web3 and the top 50 girls in web3. What we’re trying to do with that is to say, they can do it so you can do it too.”
Carter believes there’s a growing appetite for women to enter tech fields, thanks to cultural influences and the technology that surrounds us.
“There was a TV show with a female lead who solved cybersecurity crimes. As a result, the number of women who applied to go study computer science and security more than tripled,” Carter said. Today’s teens are digitally sophisticated and have grown up playing Roblox and wanting digital currency for their birthday.
Carter is involved in many corners and communities in the web3 world – including Girls in Tech, Women in Technology International, Blockchain Friends Forever and the World Economic Forum Diversity Committee.
“I just hosted a web3 and AI dinner, and I was the only woman. The men were all talking about what they could build and start, so that they could get rich – and they weren’t ashamed of it. If that was with women, the conversation would be about what we could do for good in the world,” she said.
In mixed communities, women don’t ask a lot of questions, Carter has observed. “When there’s just women, women ask the questions they think are stupid that really aren’t,” she said.
The technology’s built for accessibility, but is the culture?
Carter believes there are three big issues: A lack of education, visibility and support structures. After noticing a small number of women applicants for job openings at Unstoppable, Carter realized education must be first and foremost.
Visibility and support systems go hand-in-hand. “There’s a lot of bro culture groups that get together and help each other. We need to get more women together so we can also create femme culture in the space. Women need their tribe,” she said. Community, comradery and contributing are what will attract more women into the space, not prices or power.
For web3 to hit mass adoption and mainstream appeal, it must embrace all people, perspectives and places – otherwise, it’ll just be a repackaging of the old, not the revolution it’s pegged to be.