Don’t Wait for 120%: The Insider Advice Every Woman in Finance Needs
Written by Katherine Smith
For International Women’s Day, Katherine Smith, relationship manager on LendInvest’s development finance team shares the “insider knowledge” she received early on in her career and continues to give back to her peers today.
One of the earliest and most impactful pieces of advice or ‘insider knowledge’ I was given about development finance, or the financial world in general, is that the real decisions rarely happen in the meeting.
They happen in the conversations before it. In the relationships behind the memos. In the quiet confidence with which someone says, “This is the direction we should take,” and everyone else adjusts accordingly.
Technical excellence is essential — but it’s not sufficient. Development finance runs on trust. And trust is built in proximity, visibility, and presence. You have to claim space in the rooms where influence quietly gathers.
The irony? Most men don’t wait to be told that.
A man will speak when he’s 60–70% ready. A woman will wait until she’s 120% sure. That’s not about competence — it’s about conditioning. We analyse. We assess. We calibrate risk. We ask whether we’ve earned the right to speak. Meanwhile, someone else is already summarising the room.
And notice the language. Think about the “loud” women in your organisation — you can probably name one quickly. Now think of the “loud” man. You hesitate. He’s not loud; he’s decisive. Strategic. Strong. We are quicker to label a woman as abrasive than confident — and language quietly shapes who feels entitled to confidence in the first place.
So the insider advice I now give other women is this: don’t wait for 120%.
Say your piece. Voice your opinion. Be 70% ready and speak anyway. Confidence in development finance, much like capital, accrues to those who deploy it.
While we’re at it, practice what I call micro-feminisms. Assume the most senior person in the room is a woman. Challenge groupthink. Diversify the adjectives you use about female colleagues. Interrupt interruptions. Credit women in real time.
There’s a persistent industry of female self-improvement telling us to learn differently, speak differently, negotiate differently — the problem with this is that the assumption is that women were doing it wrong in the first place. The subtext is exhausting.
Perhaps the real insider knowledge is simpler: you don’t need to re-engineer yourself. You need to trust yourself.
Development finance is about backing potential before it’s fully proven. We do it with projects every day. We just need to get better at doing it with ourselves — and with each other.
As you rise, turn around. Influence compounds fastest when it’s shared.