in the U.S., but just 12.5 percent of CFO positions in Fortune 500 companies, and only 11 percent of executive positions in Silicon Valley companies. The need in the tech industry is acute.on how women leaders are enabling businesses perform better across a wide variety of metrics. Why is that? What are women leaders bringing to the table that's helping them drive better performance?
Strong financial leadership is every bit as critical to a fledgling tech company as engineering, sales or operations. One of the most important things finance does in an organization is use data and analysis to help business leaders see things they might not see otherwise. These are the folks who keep you grounded in the world of reality, instead of the world of hope and hype.
I think there are four qualities that make someone really good at finance: the ability to listen and learn in an unbiased way, to look at things from a lot of different perspectives, to stay calm in stressful situations and to withhold a bias from analysis. Women in finance, tech or fintech witness plenty of bias. We are almost always greatly outnumbered by men wherever we go. In such settings, I am often aware that not only does the group perspective differ from my own, but that it also comes as a surprise to the rest of the group that anyone would see things differently.