17 per cent of men, 6 per cent of women: where the difference comes from

There is a figure I rarely show in talks, because it is so easily misread. It comes from a survey by PostFinance and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences in the summer of 2024, with just over three thousand participants in Switzerland.

The factor is roughly three. On hardly any other money question is the distance this wide. For securities in general it is much smaller. For savings accounts it barely exists.

This is not a Swiss peculiarity. Surveys from other countries land in a similar range, and the ones that break Bitcoin out separately tend to find the gap wider than for investing generally. So the explanation is unlikely to lie in Swiss pension rules or Swiss banking.

Three explanations I find insufficient

«Women are more risk averse»

This is the most common explanation and it has a grain of truth. As a complete explanation it does not work. Someone who is risk averse usually chooses something safer instead. What I see is rarely a considered decision in favour of an alternative. It is postponement without a decision.

Interestingly, the large Swiss study of 2026 notes that in deeper analysis the difference between men and women is largely absorbed by risk appetite. That does not mean risk appetite is the cause. It means it may be the same underlying factor showing up in both numbers.

«Women are not interested in the subject»

This one is disproved in my working life every month. Since February 2024 I have run evenings for women in Zurich. They fill up regularly. More than a thousand women have now taken part in my formats. The interest exists. It is looking for a different way in.

«Women have less money to invest»

This also explains too little. The gap persists when income is accounted for. And Bitcoin is one of the few things where the entry amount can be arbitrarily small. Twenty francs is technically entirely sufficient.

What I observe instead

The 2026 study offers the most useful clue. Asked why they never invested, the majority of those who never did answered «I do not know enough». More often than fear of losses, more often than doubts about the technology.

The part that is worse if you live abroad

There is a variation on this that I hear almost exclusively from women who live outside their country of origin, or outside a city with a scene. It goes something like: «I hold some Bitcoin. I have never spoken to another woman who does.»

That isolation does something specific. It means every question stays inside your own head, because there is nobody to try it out on. And it means a wobble in the price is something you sit with alone, which makes it much larger than it is.

There are women holding Bitcoin in every country. Most of them do not know a single other one where they live. That is not a small detail, it is most of the problem.

Why the tone makes the difference

Bitcoin is mostly explained by men, for an audience that has already started. Nobody is to blame for that, it follows from who arrived first. It does have consequences for the tone.

Anyone who walks into the second room carrying the questions from the first leaves again. Not from lack of interest, but because they reasonably conclude they were not the intended audience.

Why this figure is more than a statistic

You can hold very different views on Bitcoin, and there are good reasons to decide against it. What troubles me is something else: the three-to-one gap does not come about because women look at the subject and decline. It comes about mostly because they never look at all.

A decision you never made is not a decision. And on a question that may touch your pension, your independence and your own financial future, there is a difference between saying no and never having been asked.