Why fintech needs to embrace gender equity

In March 2019, NASA announced it was going to do something it had never done before: entrust an all-female team to conduct a spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The event was scheduled to coincide with International Women’s Month, making history and showing 4 billion women on earth that the sky was not the limit anymore.

But despite its groundbreaking engineering and capacity, the thousands of brains working for NASA didn’t anticipate the most basic of requirements. The agency only had enough female-sized space suits to fit one of the astronauts in the all-women team, which consisted of just two members.

Consequently, the mission was aborted, and history-making had to wait for another day.

Four years on and we still have a lot of work to do to shake off our gender blind spots and meet this year’s International Women’s Day theme of embracing equity. For instance, while women make up half the global population, they are vastly underrepresented in the world’s biggest tech companies.

Photo credit: Christina @ wocintechchat.com / Unsplash

From dating apps to AI algorithms, gender biases pervade the industry. Most fintech players don’t even bother to collect gender data, so they’re missing out on opportunities to better serve millions of potential customers.

So the question that I and other female entrepreneurs have asked ourselves is this: why?

I get that we’re all different and I don’t expect the world to be personalized to the unique contours of my snowflake. But I deserve better options in my financial life than to hope I dodge the statistic saying that as a woman, I’m 80% more likely than a man to retire in poverty.

I want to shed light on not only the blind spots that have led us here but also focus on the innovations that women in tech all over Asia are devising to close this gap. I hope the techies reading this article show up to their stand-up meetings this week and ask one simple question: Are we capturing gendered data? And if so, what is it telling us?

The blind spots

You don’t know me

The fintech industry does not systematically collect gender-disaggregated data or analyze such information. it. Often, folks are unaware of how differently men and women behave on their platforms.

As a result, women don’t have financial products designed to suit our needs, preferences, or priorities.

I met with one of the biggest e-wallets in Asia last year and asked how women were performing on its investment platform. The company’s all-male team appeared baffled by my question. They got back to me a week later and conceded that women weren’t participating at all.

I already knew why that was the case. The week before, I held several focus group discussions and found out among female users, there was a lack of trust for this e-wallet based on a rumor.