“You women have always had as your lot the protection of the home, the love of beginnings and an understanding of cradles. You are present in the mystery of a life beginning. You offer consolation in the departure of death. Our technology runs the risk of becoming inhuman. Reconcile men with life and above all, we beseech you, watch carefully over the future of our race. Hold back the hand of man who, in a moment of folly, might attempt to destroy human civilization” (Pope St. Paul VI).

Have you ever sent a friend money through Venmo to pay them back for a coffee? Or paid for a product through PayPal or Square? Then you’ve used fintech.

Fintech, or financial technology, is a relatively new industry that uses technology to deliver and manage financial services. According to Investopedia, its early days were focused on supporting the back end of banking, but between 2018 and 2022, it shifted to focus on consumer services. Now, it “includes different sectors and industries such as education, retail banking, fundraising and nonprofit, and investment management, to name a few.”

Finance and the Feminine Genius

Women make up a minority of leaders in fintech, despite the fact that women control $20 trillion in consumer spending each year, making 85% of consumer purchases in the U.S. Why does this discrepancy matter? Aside from the question of whether the industry is hostile to women (which this article will not address), it matters because companies need to understand their users in order to give them the products and services they need. What’s more, women are more likely to lead companies with social missions, serving the most disadvantaged people around the world.

Edith Stein (later Sister and then St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) wrote that women “have ears for the softest and most imperceptible little voices.” Our spiritual motherhood makes us adept at identifying and meeting the needs of others. And, in fact, female entrepreneurs are more likely than men to start a business in order to meet a need in their community and more likely to be “social entrepreneurs” than men.

Fintech Feminists

A new book explores these ideas from a secular perspective. Nicole Casperson is a fintech journalist and founder of Fintech Is Femme, a media company focused on women in fintech. She wrote Fintech Feminists: Increasing Inclusion, Redefining Innovation, and Changing the Future for Women Around the World, released by Wiley late last year.

Casperson definitely has some ideas that are contrary to the Catholic Church when it comes to sex and women’s issues. However, the book is a treasure trove of stories about women who are making the world a better place using financial technology. In short, as she writes, they “showcase that building profitable businesses does not come at the expense of social good—they prove that the two fuel each other.”

“For too long,” Casperson writes, “we’ve been teaching women to ‘girlboss’ their way to success by mimicking men.” Casperson does not always describe women’s work the way I think we all should; for instance, she describes the “immense burden” women carry as “chief household officers,” while I would argue that caring for home and family is a challenging but beautiful responsibility (one that husbands should, of course, play a role in). However, she is right that expecting women to act like men is not the answer. And, she writes that technology can, when created and implemented well, help women free up more of their time to be with their loved ones.

“Up to 90% of a woman’s income typically goes back into her community,” Casperson writes. Ultimately, that’s why it’s so important that women are involved in making money: because when we do, there’s a trickle-down effect that benefits our families and our world.

A Broken Rung

With just those caveats, I recommend Fintech Feminists to anyone interested in how women can use technology to make the world a better place. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend another new book for women in business as wholeheartedly.

The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women—and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It is a new book by McKinsey & Co. senior partners Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez. Based on McKinsey’s “Women in the Workplace” research, the book offers some helpful tips for women seeking to climb the ladder in the traditional corporate workplace. However, I believe the authors have some significant blind spots.

Firstly, they describe “stereotypes” that women have stronger soft skills than men, overlooking the research that indicates that for at least some soft skills, these stereotypes may be real trends. (See Elise Crawford Gallagher’s and my new book, Holy Ambition, for details.) When they discuss how women give back to their community, they focus exclusively on investing in businesses, not discussing at all the ways that women give back philanthropically and how they tend to do so more than men. (Again, Holy Ambition dives into some of this data.) Finally, in their chapter on health and wellness, they discuss how important well-being is to career success—but then focus almost exclusively on financial wellness.

Overall, The Broken Rung shares some helpful advice, but it is aimed at a very specific group of women: women who have ambitions to the C-suite of a major company and want to focus on those ambitions to the exclusion of other goals. The authors pay lip service to entrepreneurship and motherhood but do not seem to value those experiences as highly as they do the traditional corporate path. They also refuse to see any differences between the sexes, which then means that their advice is only specific to women in that it discusses some of the obstacles women face in the workplace rather than also helping women embrace their feminine genius. For a book that claims to be focused on research, the cherry-picking did it, and its readers, a disservice.

Taryn DeLong is co-president and editor-in-chief of Catholic Women in Business. Her first book, Holy Ambition: Thriving as a Catholic Woman at Work and at Home, written with her co-president Elise Crawford Gallagher, is out now from Ave Maria Press. She lives with her husband and daughters outside Raleigh, North Carolina.

Connect with Taryn on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Substack. Or, visit her website, Everyday Roses.