"Not My Problem" by ml_sudo // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025

[applause] Hi everyone. Nice to meet you. You guys, can you hear me? Okay. All right.

My name is Pseudo. And to be honest, when I wrote my slides, in my mind, I I had 20% women in the audience, but today we're at about 3%. So, uh, let's see how this goes. I can barely hear myself, so I hope you can hear me and I'm not shouting. Okay.

All right. Where are my women at? Make some noise. Where are my women at? ONLY 3%.

TOMORROW WE DO BETTER. All right, I want everyone to help me out. We're going to make a sound together. We're going to do All right, let's go. Okay, it'll be obvious later why we're doing that sound.

My session today might be a little bit triggering to people. I apologize in advance. Everyone's experience is different. Everyone's experience is valid. So today we're going to talk about sexism.

[screaming]

You know what I'm talking about. Okay, men, don't worry. I'm not here to rant today. That's another day. Um, what I where I want to get to today is to get us all to conclude that women must work in trustless technology.

It is imperative that women work in trustless technology. So first off, what is trustless technology? In my definition, so on the left hand side we have today's technology. Anything you use today generally requires a lot of trust in the entire supply chain. You have to trust that everybody's doing what they said they would be doing, doing the right thing.

So you have an angel emoji here. But we don't want that. Trustless technology is a few things. These people have different definitions, but the way I interpret it is it's verifiable. You can check for yourself what the software and the hardware are doing.

They're doing what you expect and nothing more, nothing less. Um, the other thing is it is sovereign and permissionless. Nobody can gates or deny you access. The last thing is privacy preserving. That's what we're talking about all day today.

So I can selectively reveal the least amount of information uh that's necessary for my transaction to happen at my choice. So now that we have defined trustless technology, who is this talk for? It's for the wax. I just made up this term. Um it's women who are ambitious and competent.

I just really needed a K in there. So, you can pick whatever K word you want. Knowledgeable, kickass, whatever. This presentation is for you and the men who want to work with you. All right.

What kind of sexism are we talking about? So, wax are generally very opinionated. They're very strong. They're quite loud. So, wax generally don't suffer from too much sexual harassment.

It still happens, but it is the rare it is the rare individual that dares to do it. So, we're not talking about sexual harassment today. We're also not talking about institutional racism. So, institutional racism is where it's very explicit. It's things like the gender pay gap where you're paid less for the same amount of work or there's a boy club or um or there's a a very explicit glass ceiling.

We're not talking about those because those are explicit. They're easier to point out and when you can point them out, um, it's easier to deal with. Today, what we're going to talk about is ghost sexism. All right. I I also made this up um because it feels that way to me.

So, ghost sexism is hidden. It's indirect. It's very deniable. It's very hard to pin down like a ghost. It's kind of like like saying the lights are flickering because may maybe the power was weak at that moment, not because there was a supernatural force.

But wax live in haunted houses. The lights flicker a lot no matter how stable the power supply is. And over time, you don't really have a choice as a wack but to believe in ghosts. How do we look for ghosts? We're going on a ghostbuster journey now.

So, I'm going to show you two signs to find ghosts. Ghost sign number one, when a woman is delivering clear value, when she is obviously leading, especially if if if it's an informal format, uh there's no status official status. But despite that, her role is diminished. She's referred to last in an email. She's not credited where due.

These people study this. This is called micro invalidations. And my friends, this is a tactic of B players. A players, men and women don't have to put people down in order to look better. This is basically the adult corporate version of a very wellstudied phenomenon which I will read because it's very interesting.

Men who perform poorly in video games are more likely to engage in hostile behavior towards female players, particularly in competitive settings. This this pattern is linked to stat social status where lower status male players may perceive female competitors as a threat to their dominance, leading to increased aggression and sexist remarks. Studies have shown that losing male players are more likely to make unsavory comments to women while winners tend to be more pleasant. This behavior is rooted in insecurity as the presence of skilled female players can challenge the male dominated hierarchy within gaming culture. Ghost sign number one.

Here you go. Ghost sign number two is where competence is not enough. You're delivering value. You're leading. You're in charge.

Everything looks good. But one day, somebody takes you aside and says, "Hey, can you do all this, but can you also be more friendly? Can you be more warm? Can you smile more?" This is actually an even more well-studied phenomenon called the double bind.

A man can stop at being competent. A woman who is competent but not warm is negatively assessed. So you can only be competent if you are also warm. But warmth is generally correlated in people's minds with being less effective, less competent. That's why it's called a double bind.

I've observed in East Asia a disproportionate number of women in leadership positions in the top financial companies. They're CEOs, CFOs, they're in the top brass. And I found that really strange. But one day I realized after reading, watching, observing, I realized that's because they learned to play the game. They were aggressive.

They were competent. They were sharp. But at the right moments, they knew when to seem warm, to seem approachable, to not look like a threat to the to the men above them who hold the keys to their promotion. I have a little personal anecdote. I was doing well at a company and one day the boss pulls me aside oneon-one and he asked me, "Can you use more emojis in Slack?"

I looked at him. The only emoji I wanted to use with him was not a smiley face. So, these are two ghostbusting signs to look out for. If it's still hard to tell, I have one litmus test. Would they have said or done that if you were male?

And if the answer is yeah, probably not, you have found a ghost. Okay, sorry guys. What on earth do ghosts have to do with trustless technology? So my theory is that trustless technology is to ghost sexism. what property rights for women did for women's economic worthlessness about a hundred years ago.

So, story time. About 1,000 years ago in medieval Europe, like literally 1,000 years ago, there was a legal practice that emerged called coverture. Basically, the moment a woman became a married woman, she disappeared. Her legal existence dissolved. She couldn't own any property.

She can't retain the money that she earned. She cannot enter contracts and everything she earned before owned before marriage um was no longer hers. So poof, she got married, she disappeared. She had no say, no power. She was completely disempowered.

She had the same amount of agency as a stack of potatoes. And then it took 800 years until 1839 all the way until 1900 when across the US in different states married women property rights were enacted to take back some of this power [snorts] and the and this ultimately formed the co core foundation of women being able to vote because honestly if you have if you don't matter nobody needs you to vote. This is absolutely core to today's freedom. And so we see that we see that property rights helped deal with the fact that women were economically homeless uh worthless. I think my my theory is that trustless technology can free wax from ghost sexism.

How? Let's first look at nonrustless tech. Let's look at default tech and how it's not working for women. I don't know if any of you remember this, but in 2019, Goldman Sachs and Apple launched a credit card and DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails, and Steve Wnjak, tweeted they and their wives submitted an application for the credit card. They filed joint tax returns.

They have the same bank accounts. They don't have separate assets, but the men got 10 to 20x the credit limit. It was extremely embarrassing for Goldman and Apple. That's one example of trust trustful tech not working for women. And then this is a more this is a 2017 study of open-source pool requests.

Women's contributions tend to be more accepted than men's only only when they're not identifiable as women. And I can't tell you how many telegram messages I get when people don't know my gender and they go, "Yo, bro." And then lots of alpha. Nobody has ever said, "Yo, sis, lots of alpha." So, how does trustless technology help?

In these particular cases, for example, one could imagine if I conceal my gender, well, I prove that I'm a very, you know, active and valuable contributor. then I won't face the problems that these uh women contributors face. And you could flip it around and say if I were a business, I want to prove to you that my algorithm was fair that you can do that with trustless technology. This is just one example. These are just two examples of how trust tech becomes more fair for people.

So there's a lot going on and like I said, there's 97% men here and most people on stage today were men. So why don't we just let them, you know, keep doing what they're doing. Uh and we'll just support them. We'll applaud them while they uh do their work. Only if you want to die.

Okay, I'm being dramatic, but only a little. Let me give you an example. Did you know if you're a woman and you were in a car crash, you are 47% more likely to suffer serious injuries? you are 17% [snorts] more likely to die. And why?

Because the cars were designed by men. The test standards were designed by men. The crash test dummies were also only mailed crash test dummies until about 15 years ago. And even then, what they did with women was they shrunk the men. They didn't account for different body shapes, body parts, different length ratios.

And that's why you are more likely to die in a car crash than a than a man, than an average man. Similar life-threatening situations happen um in healthcare, in drug development. This is not news. And even if you don't die, even if you stay very safe, you never take a car, you never go to the hospital, it's still very miserable. Who's freezing in offices all the time?

who's lining up for the toilet for eons all the time. And I don't know if any of you play pianos, but it's just it's just physically really hard to get the keys. Um, so life can be miserable even when you don't die. And honestly, all of this is old news. What I'm really worried about is AI, right?

In the past, we we all know AI is trained on sexist data. It tends to be sexist unless corrected. very carefully. But at least with car crashes uh and freezing in an office between design and implementation, there is a space where people can intervene. But with AI doing everything, the space disappears.

You don't really have back stops anymore. So I think it's back to medieval Europe for the women at some point. So, while I didn't want this to be my problem, it is our problem. Fellow wax, you have to get in there. You have to build.

You have to be loud. You have to be opinionated. You have to be good at what you do. That is uncompromisable. The reason this slide looks terrible, I had three icons here.

I had three women doing different hand gestures. But when I exported into PDF from the platform I was using, apparently this is how they thought of women. Default androgynous/male but with a female icon. I did not misplace the position of the icons. So in summary, this is the thesis of my talk.

Wax are especially vulnerable to sexism. To combat go sexism, To combat ghost sexism, we need trustless tech. To ensure trustless tech is built sensibly, women need to be deeply deeply involved. And if you're not a woman, but you're you're of a demographic that is not the mainstream, I think you understand what I mean. This entire talk applies to you as well.

So, let's go one more time. [applause]