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Executive Summary:

Perseverance has been an essential tool for the progress of women’s rights and empowerment globally, helping to break barriers and effect change across social, political and economic arenas. Perseverance and resiliency are also vital characteristics of successful entrepreneurs and corporate leaders. While the ratio of women in C-suite roles in North America reached a new high in 2023 – 28% – this level is far from complete gender parity and many hurdles still exist in the pipeline for women to reach these top positions. Further, these percentages drop for female leaders in STEM fields, which includes FinTech, and female-only founding teams raised a mere 2% of total US VC funding in 2023, the lowest level since 2016, showing that the path of progress is far from linear. Tenacity and persistence each day – whether for raising that next funding round, developing a new product, making strategic decisions or climbing the corporate ladder – are key to reaching individual career goals as well as for creating lasting societal changes to the empowerment of women in the workforce.

For this report, we assembled a collection of 26 exclusive interviews featuring leading female founders, CEOs, executives and investors in the FinTech industry to gain insight into how perseverance has played a role in their career journeys, how they have navigated challenging market dynamics of late, and what work still needs to be done to empower women and further diversity in our industry.