BOOK REVIEW: WALK THE TALK

Only 17 per cent of fintech leadership roles are held by women. This clearly is an issue but one that is becoming rightly more recognised.

To help wade through the challenges of this reality, FinTech Women Walk the Talk: Moving the Needle for Workplace Gender Equality in Financial Services and Beyond by Nadia Edwards-Dashti offers solutions of exactly how things can be changed.

“We have a big problem in technology and fintech where businesses are not reflecting the gender balance of society,” she writes, and data shows she is correct. However, rather than trying to explain to readers why a lack of gender representation is an issue, she skips straight to how we can build a more gender-equal industry.

A BLUEPRINT

Having interviewed 150 women who work in the financial services technology field as part of her podcast series Fintech with Nadia: the diversity, equity and inclusion discussions, Edwards-Dashti presents the book as a blueprint for the industry to follow to build inclusive teams, centred around the advice of these women in fintech.

The book begins with a long list of interviewee biographies: the people she has spoken to, both men but mainly women, whose insights formed the inspiration for her book. At first, I thought it was an unusual choice to place these biographies at the beginning, when you would expect them at the end, but placing people at the forefront really highlights the importance of their contributions and hammers home a clear message that the gender issue needs to be tackled together. Some names include Joanne Dewar, CEO of Global Processing Services (GPS), Dr Leda Glyptis, chief client officer of 10x Banking and Louise O’Shea, CEO of Confused.com.

The inclusion of the insights, thoughts and words of these fintech leaders is one of the hallmarks of the book, making it feel like a truly collaborative effort. Edwards-Dashti says herself that it isn’t all her words, but all backed up and influenced by the many women she has spoken to throughout her career. Not only to support a collective effort, but it also champions the women who are already in the space, showing off the number of potential role models and allies an aspiring fintech woman already has.

A UNIQUE LENS ON THE INDUSTRY

Looking at some of the content, Edwards- Dashti presents her thoughts starting with a section on what fintech actually is. This provides context to her later ideas on helping gender diversity within the industry, where she explains fintech in her ‘unique’ way. She gives a whistle-stop tour of the creation of the industry and the original cause of fintech: to make the financial industry more accessible to all.

While those in the industry will likely already be privy to this kind of information, it was interesting to see the sector from Edwards-Dashti’s perspective. Particularly with the lens of how the customer needs of fintech is one of the key arguments for a need for different perspectives with a company, with the diversity of thought allowing a fintech to serve their customer base better.

I also applauded and agreed with her stance on how career pathways into fintech aren’t modelled after a traditional corporate finance view. That ‘you don’t need to be from a Russell Group university, have won a boat race or be over 40 before you make partner’.

FINTECH WOMEN WALK THE TALK: MOVING THE NEEDLE FOR WORKPLACE GENDER EQUALITY IN FINANCIAL SERVICES AND BEYOND by Nadia Edwards-Dashti Available: Kindle and Hardback

Fintechs are, quite rightly, changing the status quo within finance, and have been ever since the creation of the concept. This, as Edwards-Dashti points out, gives all the more reason to promote further change when it comes to gender diversity as fintech is already doing the work, it just needs to go further. Fintech has always been about making change happen, and the kind of change Edwards-Dashti is talking about is just another step in the process.

A HISTORY OF EXCLUSION

In Chapter 4, Edwards-Dashti outlines the history of exclusion in both finance and technology workspaces to authentically tackle the gender imbalance within today’s fintech community. She outlines exactly which issues need to be addressed, including how women are simply not given the same opportunities within business as men. Billie Simmons, co-founder of Daylight, sums things up quite nicely, with Edwards-Dashti quoting: “ Finance was built for and by straight, white, cis men.” When looked through that lens, things start to make sense, with her detailing the many gender ‘gaps’ in the industry and other areas of that need to be addressed.

This leads into a later chapter entitled ‘The issues we must acknowledge’, where Edwards-Dashti outlines the industry landscape and how it looks and feels for women. She gives them an understanding of the unique challenges any minority faces about their working environment and asks the question: Why don’t we attract more women to fintech? Here, she makes a crucial, fantastic point about the industry, quoting Alexander den Heijer: “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”

To me, this entirely hits the nail on the head, as for too long the onus has been on women to change to join the industry, whereas really it should be the other way around. Edwards-Dashti builds on this, highlighting the areas that need work and the familiar microaggressions that need to be addressed in order to attract, retain and promote more women to the space.

THE INCLUSION MISSION

Edwards-Dashti’s mission was to take the reader on an inclusion journey to open up their eyes to the real challenges faced when trying to tackle the gender imbalance in fintech, and I believe she has done just that. As a champion of the good fintech can do and the potential for change within the industry, her work is an honest highlight of the challenges faced by women, and how we as an industry need to overcome those challenges together, regardless of who or what gender we are.

Ultimately, this book is a celebration of the female fintech community, and shares the perspectives of ‘the great, the powerful, the wonderful women of fintech’, as well as importantly the male allies to the cause.

I think this book is definitive proof that actually, fintech women DO walk the walk, and should be read by all those looking to make a difference in the industry, and even those who aren’t.