When Fortune published its recent interview with Oxford’s dean, Kathy Harvey, the argument echoed what many in the industry already recognise. Finance still runs on old assumptions about women, even if the market is changing.

In 2023, just 2.1% of global venture capital went to women-led businesses, a number that has barely shifted over the past years. Moreover, since 2008, European companies founded by men have consistently attracted around ten times more funding than businesses led solely by women.

At Drofa Comms, we have documented these dynamics for years. Firms speak openly about equality, yet many continue to make decisions shaped by assumptions formed decades ago. Over time, these assumptions become deeply embedded in the system, making them harder to identify and even harder to remove.

How Oxford Exposed Finance’s Outdated View of Women

Finance continues to assess women through frameworks built for a very different economic reality. That’s the one in which authority, risk-taking, and leadership were historically associated with men. These assumptions were never fully dismantled. Instead, they became built into modern decision-making processes.

Harvey’s argument challenges a common explanation for the funding gap: it reflects a temporary lag or a pipeline issue. In reality, women are already building companies, delivering results, and leading at scale. The disconnect appears earlier, at the point where judgement is formed.

This is where finance’s outdated view becomes operational. Women founders are more likely to be evaluated through questions of resilience, availability, or risk appetite. Male ones, in turn, are assessed primarily on growth, execution, and market capture. These are inherited filters that shape conversations long before capital is allocated.

As a result, financial standards remain anchored to assumptions that no longer reflect how value is created in today’s economy.

What Bias Means for Products, Capital, and Talent

The dynamics Kathy Harvey describes go well beyond academic analysis. They surface consistently in how credibility is assessed, how leadership is interpreted, and how products are positioned. While interviewing many renowned female founders as part of our Women Leading the Way series, we observed the same dynamic repeatedly. Women are often required to establish legitimacy before they can engage in strategy or execution.

• Credibility is negotiated.

Even at senior levels, credibility can be reassessed based on personal choices rather than performance. This is a theme we hear frequently from women operating at the top of regulated finance. 

Julie Bourgeois, Head of Legal and Compliance at 6 Monks, reflected on this in her interview. She noted that “stepping back temporarily for family reasons sometimes led people to assume I was less committed or available.” In environments where continuity is treated as a proxy for leadership, such assumptions reshape trust regardless of results or track record.

• Leadership is judged through a narrower lens.

Visibility often intensifies bias. Leadership styles that fall outside familiar norms tend to attract increased scrutiny. Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, observed that women are expected to be “strong but not too strong, assertive but never too ambitious.” 

Over time, this calibration defines which leadership behaviours are rewarded and which are discouraged as careers progress.

• Talent pipelines narrow before capital is discussed.

The issue is rarely the absence of capable women. More often, it is the presence of early filters that determines who is perceived as investment-ready. Addressing this directly, Nicole Dyskant, CEO and Co-founder of RegDoor, noted that the barriers women face are “both structural and cultural.” 

This also includes limited access to sponsorship, professional networks, and capital. So by the time funding decisions are made, opportunity has already been unevenly distributed.

• Product and brand assumptions lag behind real markets.

A recent LinkedIn experiment shared by Chelsea Ranger showed how strongly perception still drives visibility. After switching a single hidden profile setting that labels gender from female to male, her impressions rose by more than 900%. In addition, engagement increased over tenfold, despite no change in content, name, or photo. This shows that many systems, including those used for communication and distribution, are still built on assumptions about who the “default” authority is.

Taken together, these examples show that bias rarely appears as open exclusion. More often, it acts as friction built into everyday decisions. Shaped by expectations, leadership signals, and design choices, it continues to influence talent, capital allocation, and innovation.

Conclusion: Why 2026 Demands a Different Playbook

Oxford’s intervention matters because it reframes the issue at a moment when finance can least afford blind spots. As markets become more competitive and capital more selective, misreading leadership, risk, and credibility turns into a strategic liability.

What Kathy Harvey articulates aligns closely with what we observe through our work. Women are already shaping what modern financial leadership looks like, influencing investment flows, product expectations, and institutional culture. Yet the way their work is evaluated still relies on inherited assumptions rooted in an earlier era of finance.

Our Women Leading the Way proprietary journal shows that this gap closes only when institutions update how they recognise talent and assess leadership in practice. Those that do so expand their access to innovation and growth. Those that do not risk competing for capital, clients, and ideas within a very narrow field.

The problem has been named. The industry’s next test is whether it responds.