Revolut launches scholarship to reward females in tech

The Revolut Ira Scholarship may be a step towards bringing about a workplace evolution, where an equal number of men and women occupy boardrooms.

As part of the scholarship, one high performing female student at each of the five top institutes in India will be awarded GBP 5,000 and a possible opportunity to work at Revolut when they graduate.

The scholarship is launching in India as a ‘key growth market’ before rolling out in other regions, such as Mexico and Brazil.

According to the officials, the aim of the scholarship is to ensure that bright female students are identified and rewarded early on, so that they can focus on their studies and maximise their potential as they work to become future female leaders within the fintech sector.

As part of this, Revolut launched its inaugural diversity and inclusion framework in 2021, and in July 2022 set a target of having 30% of senior management roles filled by women by the end of 2025.

The gender pay gap

Revolut has one of the worst gender pay gaps in the digital banking space. Most recently it shared that women at the company were earning 25% less than their male counterparts in a decrease of just 0.4% points from its first report for 2021.

In India, where Revolut plans to start the Ira Scholarship the gender pay gap in India is among the widest in the world, with women, on an average, earning 21% of the income of men, according to the Global Gender Gap Report 2021. A critical component of this gap is the low enrolment of women in high-paying mathematics-intensive majors at university, which shuts them out of many high paying occupations. Science and economics majors tend to dominate higher paying occupations, and men significantly outnumber women in these majors, both in India and around the world.

South Asia accounts for 24.89% of the world’s population and is among the five hardest hit regions in terms of the economy due to being highly dependent on the unorganised sector and contract-intensive labour.

Closing the gender gap

Studies paint a mixed picture for women in finance. Though the percentage of men and women entering the field is roughly equal, men typically rise to the top faster than women do. For example, among senior roles in venture capital (VC) firms, only 4.9% of the partners are female.

Overall, women outnumber men in the finance and banking industry, but the reverse is true at the most senior positions. At the beginning of 2021, women accounted for about 52% of the industry, according to research by McKinsey, but their representation fell at every step up the corporate ladder. In the C-suite, white women accounted for only 23% of executives, and women of colour another 4%.

The gap between women in the C-suite and women in senior leadership roles is currently 9%. Financial services firms will need to take intentional, strategic actions in areas such as recruitment, retention, succession planning, and return-to-office work arrangements. If they don’t ramp up efforts now, this gap may widen to as much as 14% by 2030.