December 2025 — Women Leading the Way Digest: Forbes Ranking, Fintech Leadership, and McKinsey Workplace Trends 

December brought a series of updates on women in finance, fintech, and corporate leadership. On their own, they read like routine news: a transparency report, a new UK appointment, a major ranking, a call for nominations. Taken together, they highlight that gender diversity is mainly assessed through governance outcomes. They include leadership quality, risk oversight, and the ability to retain and promote talent over time.

Here are the developments this month that suggest what the industry faces as it heads into 2026.

Wise sets a new baseline for gender diversity in fintech

Wise published an open update on its progress on gender diversity. One particularly important number is that women represent 31% of Director+ roles. So women are still notably underrepresented in managerial positions.

This matters for fintechs because at this stage, people start owning budgets, critical launches, risk decisions, and senior visibility. If fewer women reach this layer, they also get fewer chances to build the track record that leads to VP and C-level roles.

Nevertheless, Wise made it clear that they plan to reach 35% women at Director+ by the end of 2028. It also explains how it intends to move that number. Wise ties progress to hiring, retention, and career development, with function-level OKRs where representation is below target. This is where durable change typically comes from.

UK Women in Finance Champion: Debbie Crosbie’s appointment

Nationwide CEO Dame Debbie Crosbie was named the UK’s new Women in Finance Champion. Her appointment was announced on 11 December 2025, and the role started on 1 January 2026. She succeeds Dame Amanda Blanc, whose five-year tenure is linked by government messaging to a rise in senior female representation in key finance roles from 32% to 36%.

The importance of this appointment lies in continuity and expectation. The role now carries a measurable legacy. Blanc leaves behind a benchmark, and that benchmark sets the frame for Crosbie’s term. 

Will Debbie Crosbie be as successful in rising senior female representation as her predecessor? We’ll see as her tenure unfolds. With the Charter now covering a large share of the UK financial sector, progress will be visible and comparable across firms.

Forbes published its World’s Most Powerful Women ranking

The 2025 ranking was published against a difficult backdrop for women’s employment and career progression. Yet it highlights a smaller group of leaders who continued to shape outcomes at scale, across politics, capital, and technology.

Here are three of the most standout figures from the list:

• Sanae Takaichi

Became Japan’s first female prime minister, taking charge of a $4 trillion economy. Her position places her at the centre of fiscal policy, industrial strategy, and regional economic influence.

• MacKenzie Scott

Allocated nearly $900 million to higher education in a single year, including substantial funding for historically Black colleges. Her influence comes from speed, scale, and direct capital deployment.

• Lisa Su

As CEO of AMD, she secured a major agreement with OpenAI to build six gigawatts of AI chip capacity, a move with long-term implications for the global AI and semiconductor sectors.

So, power in 2025 concentrates where women control systems. Political authority, capital allocation, and core infrastructure remain the strongest levers of influence. The Forbes list reveals that women shape markets most when they move money, set rules, or build the platforms others depend on.

Women lead at the top of Big Oil

BP reached a historic point in its leadership structure. For the first time in the company’s history, and among the world’s largest oil majors, women will simultaneously hold the CEO and CFO roles. Meg O’Neill will step in as CEO from April 2026, while Kate Thomson continues as CFO.

Leadership credibility in this sector is built on operational depth, financial discipline, and crisis management. BP’s decision means that women are not only present in such environments but are trusted with full strategic control at moments of pressure and transition.

When sectors traditionally seen as “hard” normalise women in the most powerful executive seats, it gets harder for other industries to dismiss it. In that sense, BP’s move is more about resetting what leadership competence looks like at the highest level.

McKinsey Women in the Workplace: women’s career progress stalls

The 2025 McKinsey & Company “Women in the Workplace” report shows that fewer companies now focus on helping women grow into senior roles. This is happening at the same time as work is becoming harder and more demanding.

Women receive less support early in their careers. They get fewer stretch tasks, less sponsorship, and weaker signals that leadership roles are realistic. Over time, this changes behaviour. Many women stop pushing for promotion because the path feels exhausting.

Finance and fintech need long-term skill building and visible ownership of decisions. When women drop out of the pipeline early, the gap at senior levels grows later. McKinsey clearly outlines that progress slows when career systems do not work. Fixing those systems matters more than new promises.

Conclusion

Taken together, December’s developments reveal that statements no longer influence gender diversity in finance and fintech. It is assessed through systems, decision-making roles, career progression, and whether leadership pipelines hold over time.

At Drofa Comms, we continue to closely monitor all shifts in the sphere. We see gender representation as a governance and performance issue. That’s why understanding how leadership pipelines are built is central to how companies earn trust and stay competitive in 2026.

November 2025 — Women Leading the Way Digest: Meritocracy, Power, and Structural Change

This month's developments in women’s leadership across the finance sector circle back to one central point: meritocracy remains a contested space. New behavioural evidence from the London School of Economics shows how gender still colours performance assessments. 

At the same time, new leadership rankings, board-composition research, and global nomination campaigns show where women already hold influential roles in finance. They document how female leaders shape strategy, capital allocation, and governance across the sector. Let’s take a closer look at what is defining the agenda in November.

When competence is misread

The LSE’s final report from the four-year Accelerating Change Together (ACT) programme delivered one of the sharpest demonstrations of gender bias in financial services to date. In a controlled experiment, finance professionals rated a fictitious “Stephanie” as less competent than an identically performing “Stephen,” with bias particularly pronounced among male evaluators. This underscores an industry-wide problem, where women’s performance is still being judged through assumptions rather than evidence.

ACT’s conclusion unveils that firms need to rebuild the mechanisms that allocate opportunity, visibility, and voice if they want a functioning meritocracy. The report outlines practical steps — structured feedback systems, bias-resistant leadership training, stronger sponsorship networks, and better protection against “groupthink” dynamics. Without these fixes, talent continues to be mispriced.

Women redefining financial leadership

Against this backdrop, 2025’s American Banker’s ranking of the Most Powerful Women in Finance shows how women are already leading at the frontier of market transformation. Highlights include:

• Mary Callahan Erdoes, JPMorgan Chase, is embedding AI across a 30,000-person business and steering one of the world’s most influential wealth platforms.

• Abigail Johnson, Fidelity Investments, is pushing digital assets into the institutional mainstream through Fidelity Digital Assets.

• Adena Friedman, Nasdaq, is expanding the exchange into a global technology and compliance powerhouse.

• Thasunda Brown Duckett, TIAA, is widening access to lifetime income solutions during volatile market conditions.

• Emily Portney, BNY, is positioning the custodian at the centre of the emerging on-chain finance ecosystem.

These leaders are not ancillary to change; they are shaping the critical levers of the industry’s next cycle — AI, tokenisation, retirement security, market infrastructure, and digital asset custody.

Visibility as a lever of influence

This month brought a wave of initiatives that strengthen women’s visibility in positions tied to decision-making and capital allocation. Barron’s opened nominations for its 2025 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance, a list that highlights women whose decisions directly shift markets and regulatory conversations.

Capital.com added further depth by publishing its list of 50 women investors who manage substantial portfolios or hold significant strategic influence across global finance and venture capital. These recognition mechanisms create public accountability and reshape expectations about who drives performance and innovation at the highest levels.

Governance data from the Gulf

Fresh structural insights came from the UAE through the 2025 Discovery Series: Women Transforming Financial Services. The study analysed board composition across 73 publicly listed financial companies comprising 539 board seats. Women hold 85 of them, or 15.8%. This is slightly above the UAE’s economy-wide average of 14.8%, meaning that finance is inching ahead in representation.

Yet progress is uneven. Eight companies, roughly 11% of the sample, have no women on their boards at all. The data shows that although representation is increasing, it is concentrated in certain institutions rather than distributed consistently. As global investors tighten their scrutiny around governance standards, such disparities will become more consequential.

Where policy accelerates progress

Hong Kong’s financial sector continues its rapid advance towards parity, with women now holding 45% of senior roles and 37% of board seats. Summarised as the “VOICES” framework, the latest KPMG report attributes this progress to a set of societal enablers. It also highlights regulatory measures such as the ban on single-gender boards and mandatory gender reporting. Yet the “mid-career dip” persists, signalling the need for better flexibility, stronger allyship, and targeted retention strategies.

This week also saw Banco Santander launch the 16th edition of its SW50 leadership programme, delivered with the London School of Economics. The initiative seeks the top 50 international women executives. In doing so, it reinforces a tendency: global banks are now investing directly in senior-female leadership pipelines rather than treating diversity as a compliance exercise. This shift, from symbolic programmes to structural talent acceleration, will be one of the metrics to watch over the coming year.

Conclusion

What these findings collectively reveal is a system in transition. Bias continues to distort how competence is assessed, yet visibility, governance benchmarks, and leadership-pipeline investments are gaining momentum. Rankings from Barron’s and Capital.com expand the narrative of influence. UAE board data exposes where structural gaps remain. Hong Kong’s regulatory model shows how policy can accelerate parity when executed with intent.

At Drofa Comms, we think the financial sector is moving from rhetoric to redesign. Organisations that treat gender equity as core infrastructure will define what a functioning meritocracy looks like in the next cycle.