Since its founding in 1793, Toronto, Canada, has been known for a number of “firsts.” It was the birthplace of the first shopping mall, the first European-style coffee house and the first hairless sphynx cat. And in April, another milestone will be added to Toronto’s leading list: the first all-women’s blockchain hackathon.

Female hackers will meet blockchain industry leaders as part of the CryptoChicks Hackathon and Conference. The event was organized to educate female developers in creating decentralized applications on the blockchain and in keeping with the mission of the women-focused CryptoChicks nonprofit organization.

“We started this group, CryptoChicks, with the sole mission to improve gender balance and participation of women in the community,” said Natalia Ameline (pictured, center), senior director of global business analytics at Pitney Bowes Inc. and CryptoChicks co-founder. “We try to create an environment where women feel safe to learn.”

Ameline stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) at the Polycon18 event in the Bahamas. She was joined by Nataliya Hearn (left), co-founder and director of Education Programs for Kids at CryptoChicks, and they discussed the goals of the CryptoChicks organization and tech education for children.

Eight percent representation in blockchain

The motivation for forming the group was fairly obvious: the underrepresentation of women at major cryptocurrency gatherings and within the tech industry in general. CryptoCoin.News cited a men-to-women ratio of 92 to 8 in the blockchain world, on average, and in a survey of bitcoin users conducted by CoinDesk Inc., 90 percent of 4,000 respondents were male.

“If you go to meetups you may have in a room of 100, maybe one or two women,” Hearn said. “Women shouldn’t think that there’s all these guys and they all know what they’re doing. They also don’t know what they’re doing; everything is changing.”

Introduced to blockchain technology four years ago, Ameline does not necessarily buy into the notion that the increasingly early age in which children, male or female, become exposed to technology is a bad approach. “Kids are intuitive. They know what interests them.… We need to nurture that interest,” Ameline said. “They don’t need to go to the job that they hate. Instead they should do the job that they love.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Polycon18.

Photo: SiliconANGLE