Recap: Women in Tech Sweden x Skandia

A Proud Partnership – and a Room That Showed Up

Hillevi Santoro, who leads tech for Skandia’s insurance business and has been with the company for 13 years, welcomed the crowd and offered a window into what Skandia looks like from the inside. The company of roughly 2,400 employees, of which 1,200 in Stockholm, has over 600 working in tech – meaning, as Hillevi put it with a smile, that about every other person you pass in the corridor is a tech colleague. Among developers specifically, 28% are women – a number the team is actively working to grow. In leadership roles across the organisation, the split is already 50/50.

Hillevi also reflected on what makes Skandia’s culture distinct: a long-term mindset, transparency, and what she described as doing things “with heart” – from health coverage bundled into pension products to green and social bond investments from an 860 billion SEK capital base.

Åsa Johansen, co-founder of Women in Tech Sweden, took the stage next and reminded the room why showing up matters. “In Women in Tech, I meet women every day who are facing decisions about their future in tech,” she said. Should I enter the industry? Should I change direction? Do I even want to stay? Those decisions, she noted, don’t happen in a vacuum – they depend on inspiration, role models, and whether you feel genuinely welcome to make them. The evening, she made clear, was designed to deliver all three.

The Live Podcast: When Behavioural Science Meets Personal Finance

The centrepiece of the evening was the live recording of En Påse Pengar, hosted by Christina Sahlberg. Her guest was Katarina Graffman – doctor of cultural anthropology, researcher, lecturer, and someone who has spent over 20 years studying economic behaviour.

The conversation ranged widely, and it rarely went where you might expect a finance podcast to go.

We are not rational – and that’s not a flaw

One of Katarina’s opening provocations was a question to the room: do you think you drive better than average? Half of the room raised their hand. That, she explained, is a near-universal human tendency – we systematically overestimate our own competence. And it shapes how we handle money, risk, and decisions of all kinds.

Rather than framing this as irrationality, Katarina introduced the concept of humanistic rationality: the idea that we often do things that look irrational on paper, but make perfect sense when you understand the social logic behind them. Buying a box of Aladdin chocolates you know contains palm oil, because it’s your grandmother’s favourite and the conversation it sparks is worth everything – that’s not irrational. That’s human.

“We are inconsistent, emotional, and we behave in relation to others,” she said. “We cannot send information to people and expect them to change.”

The flock and the individual

Katarina also explored the tension between how Swedes see themselves – as highly individualistic – and how they actually behave. Research suggests that the more individualistic a culture, the more dependent people are on group belonging for identity formation. She pointed to Stureplan in Stockholm as a known testing ground for international consumer brands, precisely because Swedish flock behaviour is so predictable and observable.

This plays out in financial behaviour too. Fear of missing out, herd investing, and the difficulty of sticking to financial plans all trace back, at least partly, to our deep social wiring.

Generation Bianca and the limits of attitude surveys

One of the most talked-about concepts of the evening was Katarina’s notion of “Generation Bianca” – her term for a cohort of young women whose real-world financial behaviour diverges sharply from their stated values. Survey after survey shows young people ranking sustainability and ethics as top priorities. But behavioural data tells a different story: this is the group with the fastest-growing debt at the Swedish Enforcement Authority (Kronofogden), driven largely by consumer loans.

The takeaway wasn’t a criticism of young women, but a methodological warning: attitude surveys measure what people say, not what they do. “When you get those reports with all the numbers,” Katarina told the audience, “think carefully about what kind of study it actually is.”

Women, risk, and the women building tech

The conversation also touched directly on why women tend to invest less and take less financial risk than men. Katarina pointed to both cultural conditioning and structural confidence gaps – noting that many women she encounters hold back from roles and opportunities because they don’t yet feel fully qualified, while many men take the leap without a second thought. “You learn enormously from saying yes,” she observed.

She extended this to tech more broadly. As AI systems are increasingly designed in rooms dominated by men, the need for diverse perspectives – not just gender diversity, but genuine breadth of human understanding – becomes a matter of getting the technology right. An engineering CEO she had recently met had said it plainly: “We have an enormous need for knowledge about people – all categories – because when we build now, it’s the small things that make it go so wrong.”

Building habits that actually stick

Asked how to build financial habits that hold, Katarina was pragmatic: small steps, not big transformations. The pandemic, she argued, was the most instructive case study. Millions of people declared it would change everything – the “new normal” would last. The moment restrictions lifted, travel and shopping rebounded to record highs. The only habit that stuck was working from home, because it was the one that provided immediate personal benefit.

Change happens when it serves the individual directly, and when it’s embedded in routine rather than willpower. Financial apps that make saving visible and frictionless are a real tool here, she noted – not because information changes behaviour, but because the right environment can make the right behaviour feel natural.

Key Takeaways

We overestimate ourselves – and it costs us. Overconfidence is near-universal, and it shapes financial decisions in ways we rarely acknowledge.

Behaviour and attitudes are not the same thing. Attitude surveys are useful, but they measure intention. Always ask what the data is actually capturing before drawing conclusions.

“Irrational” choices often have a rational social logic. Before writing off a decision as impulsive, consider the human relationship it might be serving.

Diversity in tech is a design requirement, not a diversity metric. Systems built without breadth of perspective will reflect those gaps – in ways that are often small, and often significant.

Habits beat willpower. Small, sustainable steps embedded in daily routine outperform ambitious behavioural overhauls every time.

A rich life isn’t counted in income. Katarina’s closing reflection: she chose meaning over money early in her career, and she has never looked back.