Women Are More Fun :)
Women are more fun — game over :-)
After almost 22 years in this financial technology business, I have been to my fair share of events and dinners and meetups. I have sat through an hour long lecture on the problems inherent in the Payments Services Directive in Luxembourg. I’ve seen people slam their fists on a table in protest to the idea that social sign-in for bank accounts could be workable. I once belonged to the MiFID working group.
But I have never ended an evening of discussion and chat in the FinTech space where several people left with comments such as:
“This was the best meetup I have ever been too.” and (my favourite) “This was better than the party I went to on Saturday night.”
This was last night and the occasion was the second FemTech meetup, run by the formidable Ghela Boscovich of Zafin Labs and hosted by Lloyds Banking Group. The FemTech meetups were born out of a Swift Innotribe project for Sibos last year, and enabled by Sam Maule of Carlisle Consulting, to showcase and promote the various women who work in global financial technology.
The numbers are appalling. Less than five percent of startup founders in the FinTech space are women. Financial News published their annual Women in Finance survey — and the results show a mostly discouraged and, almost, depressed female workforce.
What tends to get me angry (and I am trying not to write blogs angry anymore — however, passion is my muse!) is that whenever anyone in this industry talks about diversity, the burden of proof tends to fall on the people advocating diversity rather than those who sit idly by accepting the status quo.
When just advocating the need for more women (just women, mind you! — 50 percent of the population!) to participate in the FinTech space, statistics need to be rolled out highlighting how female led business tend to be more profitable or showing that adding women to their boards adds to a company’s longevity. Debates around systematic basis within financial services and tech, the glass ceiling and whether or not women know how to adequately ‘lean in’ (or whether they even need to) are starting to grate on my last nerve.
So, in an effort to cultivate this attitude of focusing in the positive, I am going to throw out a brand new, entirely unscientific theory about why there needs to be more women in the FinTech space and why your company needs to hire more women now.
Women are more fun.
There, I said it. Women make work more pleasant. They laugh, they are supportive. I don’t know many women who would sit and lecture for an hour on the PSD, in a stuffy room, in a grey suit. But I know many who would chat about the ramifications of the PSD 2, while wearing statement jewellery and sipping a glass of wine. Which room would you rather sit in?
There it is — my positive vibes for this week. Women make work and life and Tuesday night meetups talking about digital banking with Lloyds’ John Webster — a lot more fun. Pass me a glass of wine.
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