Last weekend I sat on the jury of a students’ Startup Competition. Three (female!) judges including myself were judging 10 finalist teams.
Two of those teams had a woman on them. One was all-female. The other had one woman and 4 men. Two out of ten.
I know this ratio well - from my own years in maths class in the 90s, then working in tech, now being in board rooms. And still, sitting there, I caught myself thinking:
But they are all in their twenties. Weren't they supposed to fix this?
…We tell ourselves a comfortable story: our daughters will have it easier, time will do the work, Gen Z does not carry our bias.
Well - time is NOT doing the work. Boom.
And here is why this belongs in a money newsletter 💡
The teams in those finals are building the next wave of products, including the apps and AI tools we all will use to save, borrow and invest. We all, not men only.
When women are missing from the room, the product ships with a blind spot. We are the ones who pay for it, usually without noticing.
So - this edition is about noticing. And as always, - acting 😉. Because only action builds confidence.
The belief worth changing
Most of us assume the fix has to happen inside the room. More women founders, more women engineers, more women on the jury. All true - look at us, 2 amazing fellow judges by my side.
But - all very slow. Our feedback about disparity of the teams in the final will only be acted upon in a year’s time.
So I started digging into how the famous course corrections actually happened.
The women who changed the outcome were mostly outside the room, and you can be too. A journalist who asked an obvious question. A customer who refused to accept a number. A regulator who opened a file. A founder who got tired of waiting and built her own. A congresswoman with a photocopier.
A seat on the product team helps. But it is not required. What moves a product is someone who notices, tests, and says so, with enough noise or enough money behind it.
Five rooms - five blind spots
1. Apple Health: sodium, yes. Periods, no.
In 2014 Apple launched its Health app, and their (male) VP of Engineering promised it would track "all of your metrics that you're most interested in." It tracked weight, blood alcohol, sodium, copper, selenium. Even molybdenum (ever wondered of your molybdenum level by any chance? 🧐)
It did not track periods. The metric that half of the planet log in monthly.
The fix came from outside. The Verge's (female) editor asked publicly why Apple cared more about our sodium than about women's health. Femtech founders like Ida Tin of Clue had already built what Apple forgot. And only a year(!!) later, iOS 9 added Reproductive Health.
So what? The gap was a market before it became a fix. Femtech now exists as an investment category precisely because rooms like that one didn't see it.
2. Apple Card: the algorithm that "didn't see" gender
August 2019: Apple and Goldman Sachs launch the Apple Card. Three months later, David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder/CTO of Basecamp, tweeted:
The Apple Card is such a fucking sexist program. My wife and I filed joint tax returns, live in a community-property state, and have been married for a long time.
Yet Apple’s black box algorithm thinks I deserve 20x the credit limit she does. No appeals work.
Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, replied: same with me and my wife, 10x.
New York's financial regulator, led by Linda Lacewell, looked into it. In 2021 it found no illegal discrimination. The card never asked whether you were a man or a woman, and people with similar credit histories got similar limits.
So where did a 20-times gap come from? From the credit files. Many of these women shared accounts with their husbands, used his card as a second cardholder, or had taken time off work. On paper, they had very little credit history of their own. Goldman Sachs was forced to look at it again, and raised some of their limits to match their husbands'.
So what? A system that ignores gender can still treat women worse, if the information it reads comes from a world that didn't. If your money history sits in your husband's or your partner's name, the system cannot see you.
💣Why your credit score matters. The same kind of system decides whether you get a mortgage, and at what interest rate.
It can decide whether a landlord rents you a flat 🏠, whether you get a phone contract, a car loan or a credit card, and how much each one costs. A slightly higher rate on a mortgage adds up to a lot of money over 20 or 30 years. And you often need a good file most at the moments life changes: after a divorce, a move, or when you start a business. Checking is free. Fixing a mistake takes time. Look and prepare before you need it.
Could it happen in Europe? Most of my readers are based in the EU. The systems are different, but they work the same way. Germany uses SCHUFA. Spain uses the Banco de España's CIRBE register, plus lists of unpaid debts such as ASNEF. The UK uses three companies: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. None of them scores you on gender. But all of them read your history.
3. Google Glass: the fix from inside, yet too late
Google smart glasses began in 2010 as a prototype that was described as a cross between a scuba mask 🤿 and a cellphone 📱. Only in 2011 Isabelle Olsson joined Google X to make it wearable for women and people having long hair, and later said that designs reflect the teams that create them.
By 2014 Glass had an image problem: geeky, $1,500, with no visible thought for half its potential buyers. A solution came from launching frames by Diane von Furstenberg, iconic American designer, which Olsson called the first Glass designed with women in mind.
So what: a blind spot fixed after launch costs a multiple of one fixed before it. Investors pay that bill first. Customers pay it next.
4. Ellevest: she stopped waiting and built her own
Sallie Krawcheck ran wealth management at Citigroup and Bank of America, and watched the industry treat women as a marketing problem: new brochure, but same product. In 2014 she co-founded and launched Ellevest.
It was a robo-advisor - an automated digital platform that uses algorithms to manage and build investment portfolios for users. There are many of them. Very newbies-friendly: you name your goals (retirement, a home, a business, time off), and an algorithm builds and adjusts a portfolio of ETFs.
The difference sat under the hood. Built by a woman, it planned with women's numbers instead of the defaults: longer lifespans, salaries that peak earlier, more career breaks.
It even launched cashback for female-led businesses.
Now the honest part. A robo-advisor charges tiny fees, so it only makes money at huge scale. Krawcheck stepped down in December 2024 for health reasons. A few months later the new co-CEOs sold the robo business to Betterment and kept only clients with $500,000 or more. One industry analyst said it plainly: low fees are hard to turn into profit without scale.
Being an investor, I can say: a brand built for women paid more to win each customer than gender-blind competitors marketing to everyone, and many of those customers arrived with small first balances. Expensive to win, little to earn from each. That's a low-margin business.
So what? Every money app runs on someone's numbers. Your pension calculator, your budgeting app, your AI assistant: whose lifespan, whose salary, whose career are they assuming? Whose data are they modeling on? If you can't explicitly see it, ask them.
5. Lindy Boggs: a woman and a copy machine. Fascinating!!
1974, the US House Banking Committee. A bank could still refuse a single woman a credit card, and a married woman needed her husband to co-sign. Congresswoman Lindy Boggs noticed the draft of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act did not ban discrimination by sex or marital status.
She added the words herself, photocopied the new version, and told her colleagues she was sure leaving it out had been an oversight.
Brilliant, right? The new ‘photocopied’ version of the Act passed that year as noone dared to argue.
Europe was not ahead. In West Germany a married woman could open her own bank account only from 1958, and until 1977 her right to work depended on her husband. In Spain, the licencia marital required a husband's permission for an account, a job contract or property until May 1975.
Fifty-one years ago. Some of our mothers opened their first account with a husband's permission.
The Toolkit: seven things to do with your money this autumn 🍂
Noticing is step one. But Eugenia, what can we do about it? Glad you asked.
Pull your own file.
Germany: since March 2026 SCHUFA has a new score, from 100 to 999, built on twelve published criteria. You can check it free, any time, through your SCHUFA
online account.
Check your SCHUFA score →Spain: we don’t have a single score here. Banks look at your CIRBE report from the Banco de España, which lists your loans and guarantees. Your own report is free through the Banco de España's online office, with Cl@ve or a digital certificate. If a lender turns you down, also check the private debtor files such as ASNEF.
Request your CIRBE report →NB: not a bad idea to ask your potential spouse for this report too, before getting married and sharing liabilities.
UK: three credit reference agencies keep your file: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Lenders don't all report to the same one, so the three files can differ. Each agency must give you your statutory credit report free. Watch the line called financial associations: a joint mortgage, card or overdraft links your file to your partner's. After a separation, close the joint credit and ask each agency for a notice of disassociation.
Experian → Equifax → TransUnion →
Read the criteria like a term sheet. The new SCHUFA criteria include how old your oldest bank account is, how long you've lived at your address, and how many accounts or cards you applied for recently. None of them is gender. But all of them reward a long, uninterrupted financial life in your own name. Who loses? The woman whose accounts ran through her partner, who moved after a separation, who opened her own card at 45. Essentially your Apple Card logic, but European edition. Back in 2018 the OpenSCHUFA project found hints that age, gender and frequent moves affected the old score.
See the new SCHUFA criteria →Build a history in your own name. One current account and one card that are yours alone, even inside a happy marriage. Keep your oldest account open: because the age counts 💪. In Spain, if every loan sits in your partner's name, your CIRBE says nothing about you. To a bank, you are a blank page.
Ask for the explanation and the human. EU courts ruled in 2023 and 2025 that credit scoring falls under data-protection rules, and that you can ask how the logic reached its result. From 20 November 2026, the new EU Consumer Credit Directive applies: lenders may not use sensitive personal data or your social media in assessing a consumer loan, you can ask for a human to review an automated decision, and discrimination on grounds of sex is explicitly banned. Six weeks from now. Use it.
Check whose life your tools assume. Open your finance apps, pension or retirement calculators. What life expectancy does it use? What salary curve? Can you enter a career break? If you can't change those inputs, the tool chose them for you - and not necessarily in your favor.
That’s A LOT of practical info for one edition. Use it 🙌
The Shelf
And last but not least, four books on this topic for the long version of this edition. And, of course, for your autumn evenings 📖
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (2019). If you read one book on this list, read this. It tells the story of a world built on male data failing women, from crash tests to medicine to offices. The Apple Health story is in there.
Own It: The Power of Women at Work by Sallie Krawcheck (2017). The Ellevest founder's case, in her own words, written before the business met its limits.
Brotopia by Emily Chang (2018). How the rooms in tech became so male. Full stop.
The Woman I Wanted to Be by same very Diane von Furstenberg that designd a better version of Google Glass (2014). It’s a very inspiring memoir: building a business, losing it, buying it back. A couple of husbands and kids along the way. Her new book will be out in January, to start the year of her 80th birthday (and she is still wearing mini 💃). Read the old one now so you are ready.
Know someone who just moved, separated, or is about to apply for a mortgage? Share this with her. She'll want to check her file first.
With love and practicality,
Eugenia
Archive available on the website 👇🏼
