I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be these weirdos.
Chloe Stevens bought her first stock when she was 10 years old. She and her dad would track the markets on CNBC, buying into Barnes & Noble and the Hershey Company because they were doing well, but also because Stevens liked books and chocolate. When she got to high school, she offered to make monthly budgets, free of charge, for any friend who wanted one.
By age 20, Stevens knew she had a passion for personal finance — and she wanted to get better at it.
Stevens, now 21, kept hearing about one particular subreddit, now known as the community that drove GameStop’s stock market surge. Once she joined, she quickly realized that r/wallstreetbets was not a welcoming place for women.
Since GameStop stock took off last week, much has been written about the various players in the story: the Redditors and amateur financiers who invested in the struggling video game company, and the Wall Street moguls who bet against its success.
On both sides, the vast majority of stakeholders are men.
Unfolding at the intersection of three male-dominated spheres — Reddit, video games and Wall Street — the GameStop story was always going to be “dude-centric,” said Adrienne Massanari, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies digital culture and gender and has written a book about Reddit. While women have made inroads in these traditionally male spaces, she said, r/wallstreetbets — the original entry point for the latest round of GameStop trading — feels particularly inaccessible to many women, Massanari said, with posters trafficking in misogynistic and racist comments.
