Oslo, Norway — To honor Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, we wanted to celebrate how far women have come in both finance and technology. Women make up 40% of our team, and within our larger ecosystem, which includes Fintech Innovation and Neonomics, women now have 44% representation — something to recognize and celebrate for sure! Equality and diversity are important to us as one of our core values and an essential factor in our ability to build better financial technology to serve our customers.
Fintech Innovation was founded in 2016 to challenge the finance industry and bring positive change through technological innovation and digital transformation. We look up to the innovators and inventors, both men and women, who have changed the world through science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (STEM) and aspire, in our own way, to join them. So, when we moved into our new office in 2018, we held a poll and a workshop to name our meeting rooms, and we decided to name them after the innovators that inspire us most. From that workshop, a tradition was born, and our current meeting room names now include Leonardo Da Vinci, Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, Archimedes, and Grace Hopper. So when it came time to name our final meeting room, the Eternic team thought what better way to celebrate Women’s History Month than to add another female innovator to the lineup.
The Poll — Who made the list
To initiate the process, we created a list of four female innovators we admired to include in a poll that we could share with the office as well as our followers on social media. We launched the poll on Sunday, March 8th, in celebration of International Women’s Day and kicked off a week-long campaign to gather your votes. Here’s an overview of the innovators we had to choose from:
Margaret Hamilton
As a working mother and Director of the MIT Instrumentation Lab in the 1960s American computer scientist, Margaret Hamilton played a significant role in developing the on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo missions to go to the moon. She went on to found and head two software companies. Through her many projects and papers, she contributed to software engineering as we know it today.
Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was an English mathematician in the mid-1800s. Ada discovered that Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the first computer, could do more than just calculations if given a sequence of instructions. She wrote the first algorithmic sequence for the machine to follow, which has made her considered by many to be the “first computer programmer.”
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician turned aerospace technologist who worked for the agency that would later become NASA. Her work in orbital mechanics and trajectory calculations were critical to the success of putting the first men on the moon and their safe return. Her work contributed to future space shuttle missions and even missions to Mars. She was the first African-American woman to work at NASA as a scientist.
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart was an American aviator and the first female pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean and the first person to fly across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. While a visiting professor at Purdue University in 1935, she worked as an advisor in the aeronautical engineering department and a career counselor to women students before her mysterious disappearance during a flight in 1937.
And the Winner is…
After a week of voting, the winning innovator we will name our conference room in honor of is… *drum roll please*… Ada Lovelace! Ada was a clear winner in the vote by a margin of 23%.
When we asked some of our staff why she stood out for them here are some of the response we got:
“Imagine being born in 1815, and still get to show that you are an intelligent and resourceful woman. She is also known as the world’s first computer programmer, and the fact that she has made her mark on the future of computer programming is, to say the least, impressive. That deserves respect! And I can’t help but comment on her cool name, and the awesome portraits of her.”
– Tine, Office Manager
“Gotta stick up for a fellow mathematician, also I am most familiar with her work.”
– Ingrid, Systems Analyst
“What appeals to me about Ada was her ability to see the potential beyond what was being presented. She took the initiative and took it to the next level. All the candidates, but Ada in particular for me, embody our belief that everyone should have a voice in what we’re building. You never know what they may contribute given the opportunity.”
– Frankie, Marketing and Communication Lead
Want to learn more about Ada? Check out this short video:
While adding a name to a conference room may seem like a small gesture, we interact with these rooms every day. Whether we’re headed into them for a 1:1 meeting, sprint planning, or a full-on platform-build workshop, it’s good to be reminded to think creatively, be innovative, and blaze new trails despite the conventions that might try to hold us back.
We have ambitious plans to build a new type of transfer platform, one that will change cross-border payments and settlement as we know it for the better. It takes a talented and dedicated team to build new financial technologies. If you have experience in fintech, payments, or platform development, and you want to work for a company that values innovation and wants to build something new — JOIN US!
You can learn more about Eternic here: Life at Eternic
