Women without previous experience should be given fintech internships

At business schools like ours, female and male students share the same ambition. They want strong degrees, they're equally performance-driven, and they have similar leadership aspirations. So when we ask why so many more men than women choose finance as a specialisation - 77% versus 49% in our survey - the easy explanations, like a lack of interest in demanding careers, simply don't hold up.

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What we see instead looks almost like a textbook case of a confidence gap rather than a competence gap. Female and male students rate finance as an equally attractive field. But something happens between "attractive" and "my career". And that something is exposure. Almost half of the male students we surveyed already had some finance experience, mostly an internship, before choosing their specialisation. Among female students, it was only a third. Students with that early experience were far more likely to stay in finance. Students without it often never seriously considered it a realistic path at all.

This matters because the picture people carry around of finance - long hours, cut-throat competition, a boys' club - mostly comes from the outside. Once women actually do an internship in the industry, that picture tends to shift. They discover that finance today covers far more than trading floors. There are sustainable finance, fintech, risk management, deal advisory, to name a few. They meet women already working there. And they realise the job runs on preparation and competence, not on some innate trait they might be missing.

So if banks and fintechs want more women in their pipeline (and eventually in leadership) the leverage point isn't a leadership programme fifteen years into someone's career. It's the internship and the insights that come through it. Right now, many internships implicitly favour those who already have a foot in the door, which, given the numbers above, means more men. What really shifts perspectives is opening these internships to students without prior experience. That works both ways: interns get real exposure to the field, and the teams around them often pick up fresh impulses from people who don't arrive with the usual finance background.

What internships shouldn't do, though, is treat women differently once they're in the building. No lighter workload out of good intentions, no special track. The whole point of an internship is a reality check: seeing that the people behind the desks are, in the end, ordinary people doing a job, not some superheros. That only works if interns, women included, are trusted with real, meaningful tasks rather than being treated as extra hands for the tedious stuff. Give people work that actually creates value, and two things happen: they leave with genuine confidence that they could do this, and the company gets a very good look at talent worth hiring.

That's a fix that's cheaper than any diversity programme higher up the ladder - and it starts with who gets a desk for eight weeks next summer.

Prof. Dr. Marion Festing holds the Chair of Human Resource Management and Intercultural Leadership at ESCP Business School Berlin. She also co-directs the Women in Finance Chair and serves as the academic director of the Women in Leadership executive programs in Berlin. Founded in 1819, ESCP is the world's oldest business school, with campuses in Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, Turin and Warsaw. Each year it welcomes more than 11,000 students and 6,000 executives from 140 countries across its Bachelor's, Master's, MBA, Executive MBA, doctoral and Executive Education programmes.

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