Women shut out of leadership roles in the metaverse

While proponents of metaverse technology claim its platforms will be built on the pillars of transparency, accessibility and equality, metaverses are already exhibiting the same old biases relating to money and power. Despite women committing to greater amounts of meaningful engagement with metaverse technologies, investors are more likely to invest in metaverse companies run by men, and are more likely to invest larger amounts in them.

Web3, or Web 3.0, is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web. Its advocates insist it is seeking to use technology to incorporate concepts such as decentralisation, transparency and fairness into a modern transaction economy. Whether that is at all feasible remains a wider question – but in the case of Web3 at least, the results so far seem to suggest not.

More than a decade of decentralisation via eternally-nascent cryptocurrency technology has yielded speculative bubble after speculative bubble, each time somehow underwritten by even fewer fundamentals than the last time. The transparency of blockchain technologies have done little to prevent various Web3 ‘entrepreneurs’ withdrawing investors’ funds and vanishing. And metaverse technology – a bandwagon many businesses are currently jumping on to boost inclusivity – has seen self-professed technology pioneers sink billions into sub-Wii recreations of work and living spaces where the only thing recreated accurately at all is the stale hierarchies it was allegedly trying to get away from.

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