A future of men ruling the financial planet?

Through the years, I’ve seen a few changes in finance and technology.  We’ve seen dress-down Friday move to dress-down everyday (if you’re a Fintech firm); we’ve seen borders and barriers breaking down between ethnicity and sexual preferences; and we’ve seen globalisation of activities.  But the one thing we haven’t seen enough of is diversity of gender.  There’s still a lot of Sexism in the City.  

I first made that blog entry eight years ago (have I really been blogging that long?) and we still see storms in a teacup like the one this week of a barrister, who got upset about being objectified through LinkedIn.

This row started after Charlotte Proudman sent an invitation to a senior partner at a law firm who responded: “I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture!!! You definitely win the prize for the best LinkedIn picture I have ever seen.”

She didn’t like that and wrote back: “Alex, I find your message offensive. I am on Linked-in for business purposes, not to be approached about my physical appearance or to be objectified by sexist men.”  She then posted his comments on Twitter, along with her outraged response that focusing on women’s looks “silences women’s professional attributes as their physical appearance becomes the subject”.

The storm hit the national media with headlines like LinkedIn sexism row: Charlotte Proudman says lawyer used site 'like Tinder' (swipe left).

The Daily Wail then discovered that she comments on male profiles (admittedly on Facebook) things like “hot stuff”

and “oooo lalala”

(swipe right)

Whatever.  I guess we’re all just males and females who feel attraction to each other or not (unless you’re at the University of Tennessee in which case we’re ze and xe).

So why am I bothering to write about this today?

Because my friend Sam Maule has been working diligently on a compendium of Women in Fintech for months now.  This is a list of 100 most notable females making a success in this male dominated industry.

Sam's first report, which came out in June as part of the innotribe program for SIBOS in Singapore next month, clearly shows what the key trends are taking place in our Fintech universe.

The good news is that banks are hiring and promoting women to the board, particularly in American and Europe. The chart below, for example, shows the percentage of women who are members of the Executive Committee of the Top 10 Banks by asset size in each region of the world:

The bad news is that tech firms aren’t following this trend:

But then how many women want to become an engineer?

So, is the future is one of male technologists ruling the financial planet? 

Read the report and attend the innotribe session to find out.  You can also see more interviews with the power women of Fintech on Sam's beta site.