Financial Inclusion from a Gender Perspective

Abstract

Women's narrower access to resources-caused by the limited spaces assigned to them throught the sexual division of labour and to the social hierarchies bulit up on the basis of their division-translates into deprivation in various social spheres, fundamentally in closely connected systems, the labour market, the welfare or social protection system and the household. This paper analyses gender differences in financial behavior among worldwide based on new data from the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database. The GLobal Findex database provides systematic indicators on measuring how people in 148 economies around the world save, borrow, make payments and manage risk. These indicators on the use of different financial services are constructed with survey data from interviews with more than 1,50,000 national representative samples and randomly selected adult age 15 and above. According to the data women make up a disproportionately large share of unbanked adults worldwide.