Jessica Carroll
Head of Marketing at The Crypto Collective
Please introduce yourself and your company and tell us about your experience as a woman in the fintech industry
I’m Head of Marketing at a mobile-first payments platform, Judopay. I’ve worked in the fintech industry for several years, and while we’re not where we need to be, it’s definitely improved. Early on in my career, I often found myself as the only woman in the room; which was a mixture of daunting, coupled with a sense of pressure to speak up. While I now find myself in rooms filled with multiple talented women, I still see a lack of female founders or CEOs in the roles above me.
What do you think the fintech space can do better to support women in C-suite roles?
We lose so much wonderful female talent due to employers or even society not being supportive enough of when some women, at the peak of their career, decide to start a family; and subsequently later return to that C-suite role. For women who do make that decision, there needs to be more flexibility and practical support to enable them to step back into those roles and continue to grow.
Something that’s also not often discussed alongside the gender pay gap is the pension gap. Even if every employer agreed to close the pay gap today, our long-term finances have already been detrimented. Scottish Widows have a campaign running at the moment where based on your age as a woman, they can estimate your final pension pot. They can then show you what your pension pot would be, if you were male. In some cases, it’s almost 100k higher.
What changes would you like to see in fintech in the near future?
Companies need to embed inclusion, diversity and additional support not only into hiring or operational practices but directly into their products and services. There are hundreds of incredible fintechs that are making great strides on this within the workplace, but then let that progress stop at the office door. By reviewing and updating the language companies use in their services or products, the applications they create, the purposes for loans etc. and aligning those with the values they uphold in the workplace they’d be making a much greater impact.
