Does financial technology still need more female geeks?
Nestled among this year's FN 100 influential women is Veronique Arnoldi, chief technology officer at Aviva Investors.
While her achievement is obviously laudable, the fact that she's the sole representative from IT in finance is indicative of the relative dearth of women still entering the sector.
Accusations of sex discrimination within investment banking and an exodus of women from Wall Street generally aside, there's still something of a stigma attached to technology.
"The perception is that you have to be a computer programming geek to enter IT, which isn't true at all," says Silka Patel, executive assistant at Cisco and founder of the new Scotland Women in Technology group. "A lack of female role models could also be discouraging girls from IT."
That's not to say there aren't women in senior financial technology positions. Within the bulge bracket banks, for instance, there's Natasha Davydova, who's just been appointed MD of group technology and operations at Deutsche Bank, Sarah Wilkinson, MD group technology at UBS and Cyndy Yap, CIO for asset management at Credit Suisse.
But banks want more of them. As one IT in finance headhunter puts it: "Banks berate us for not producing a list of top senior women in financial technology for senior roles, when it's very much a male-dominated sector."
The usual argument for offering flexible working styles to encourage more women and the pitfalls of being in a testosterone fuelled environment apply to IT. However, it's also worth looking at the flow (or lack of) junior talent.
Women made up just 24% of UK computer science students five years' ago, according to figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency - this has since shrunk to 19%.
Nonetheless, the number of women looking to work in the financial technology sector is slowly increasing; just not in the very technical roles, suggests Paul Elworthy, director, IT banking and finance at recruiters Hudson.
"Application development is still heavily male-dominated," he says. "However, for business analyst and project management roles - where the emphasis is on business stakeholder management, coordinating the project and getting things done - we're seeing a greater percentage of women applying."
