Fintech loves to describe itself as an industry of the future, where there are no hierarchies or old money. In theory, it seems real, and there are, according to some estimates, about 28% of employees in British fintech who are women. But once you move up a level — to CEO positions, to founders, or even just to senior level the picture changes, and there are only 17% of female executives.

So, why in such a new industry that does not have old frames are women still underrepresented? The thing is, there are three glass ceilings, and they are layered on top of each other.

What Is the "Triple Glass Ceiling" in Fintech?

The term was invented by researchers Chloe Fox-Robertson and Dariusz Wojczyk in an article for the journal Finance and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Their idea is that fintech is located at the intersection of three traditionally male worlds — finance, technology and entrepreneurship. 

• In finance, a woman by default does not fit into the image of an abstract white-collar with no family and no time limits. 

• In technology, she faces a barrier to entry — she is allowed into development, engineering and product roles much less often than in marketing or communications. 

• And in entrepreneurship, she has to prove her worth to venture capital, which by inertia invests in those who look like the investors themselves. 

When all three barriers converge in one industry, the effect does not add up, but multiplies — hence the "triple" ceiling appears.

The authors of the study analysed data from 100 of the largest fintech companies in the world and conducted 15 in-depth interviews with people from the industry. Although it was a 2021 study, fresh numbers do not differ that much. 

The result of their study was that women make up only 7.69% of fintech co-founders, 18.2% of executive committee members, and only 4.04% of CEOs. There was just one company in the sample that was founded entirely by a woman, while 87.23% of startups have no female founders at all. 

The situation in technical roles is even worse: women occupy only 1.49% of CTO/CIO positions, compared with 37% of marketing director positions. That said, there are not just fewer women in the leadership as a whole — they are almost by default skewed towards communication and marketing roles, away from technology and money.

How the Triple Glass Ceiling Shows Up in Fintech

It is interesting to look at numbers, but they are just a skeleton, so let’s take a look at the stories of people who have really gone through it. In a series of interviews for Women Leading The Way, this topic comes up regularly, even when the interlocutors do not talk about it directly.

In our recent one, Caroline Bansraj, Chief Operating Officer of SCRYPT, who has worked in traditional finance for three decades, honestly points to this gap: "On representation, I will be candid: digital assets still have work to do. Traditional finance spent decades developing talent pipelines, sponsorship programmes, and structures to support greater female participation. Crypto is younger and grew extremely quickly, so diversity was not always built into its development from the beginning. The opportunity, however, is significant."

Catherine Jenkin, co-founder of Kernel Media and former opinion editor at Cointelegraph, points to the gap between the technological and cultural maturity of the industry: "Web3 is forward-thinking in technology and often remarkably backward in culture. That gap exists because the two things don't automatically travel together, and building on a new financial architecture doesn't mean you've rebuilt the social one." 

She also notes that a permissive attitude towards women is a form of hidden arrogance, "a signal that your presence is being managed rather than simply expected."

So, both women agree that the gap is not in the abilities or desire of women to be in the industry, but in the fact that structures, for example, hiring, have historically been built without them.

What Could Move the Ceiling

The changes that really work start with, at first sight, ordinary things.

The first is capital, of course. If the proportion of female investors in the fund increases, so does the amount of funding that female founders receive. Investors are more likely to believe in the ideas of people whose experience they understand, and female partners are more likely to notice the potential in teams that men's venture capital bypasses. 

The language of hiring is equally important. Harsh formulations of vacancies in fintech directly reduce the number of responses from women, because they signal that this is not about a female worker even before the interview. It is worth replacing such descriptions with specific tasks and expected results.

The third is financial education, which boys and girls are still taught differently, and the gap in this knowledge is then directly converted into a gap in access to capital. In addition, many girls did not even have access to such education, as we previously wrote. 

And last but not least, it is transparent promotion criteria and a conscious rejection of presentation for the sake of representation. The difference between the meaningful presence of a woman in management and asking someone to come just to increase visibility is obvious, and it works for or against the company's reputation.

Still, none of these steps solves the problem overnight. But unlike abstract declarations about diversity, each of their results can be measured.

Conclusion

The triple glass ceiling is a working model that explains why progress in hiring women in fintech results in so poor progress at the management and capital levels. Finance, technology, and entrepreneurship have been systematically displacing women from leadership for a long time, and fintech, being at the intersection of all three, simply summarises and reinforces these barriers.

Even so, none of these barriers is inevitable. They are just the result of specific cultural expectations. This means that they can be changed purposefully, starting with the one who is called to the pitch, and ending with the one who writes the check. The industry that calls itself a revolution in finance has not even started a revolution within itself yet.