## THE DIGITAL GENDER GAP

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**Canonical URL:** [THE DIGITAL GENDER GAP](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2022/december/ogawa.pdf)

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### Underrepresentation of women in finance and fintech leadership
- Women hold fewer than 25 percent of board seats in traditional banks and bank supervision agencies (Sahay and Čihák 2018).
- Using a novel fintech firm-level data set across 97 countries, women represent less than 13 percent of leadership—both as founders and as members of executive boards of fintech firms.
- The share of female leaders in fintech has been fairly stagnant over the past 20 years.
- Regional variation in female fintech leadership:
  - Highest shares of fintech companies founded by women in the Western Hemisphere and Asia and Pacific regions.
  - Lowest shares in the Middle East and Central Asia.

### Relationship between female leadership and firm outcomes
- A 10 percent higher share of women on executive boards is associated with roughly 13 percent higher revenue and funding earned by a firm.
- Firms with a higher share of women executives earn higher revenue and receive more funding, consistent with documented positive relationships between gender diversity and firm performance (Christiansen and others 2016).
- In contrast, firms founded by women tend to make less revenue and receive less funding than those founded by men; possible explanations include greater risk aversion among women founders or gender bias among predominantly male investors.

### Women as users of digital financial services and macroeconomic implications
- Globally, 65 percent of women have an account with a financial institution, compared with 72 percent of men (Demirgüç-Kunt and others 2018).
- Increasing digital financial inclusion, including women’s access and use, is positively associated with economic growth (Khera and others 2021).
- When more women access financial services they participate more in the labor force and contribute to business activity, directly increasing GDP; greater talent diversity helps productivity growth (Ostry and others 2018).
- Fintech can help narrow financial inclusion gender gaps by removing obstacles that particularly affect women—such as mobility and time constraints—and by enabling access to financial accounts from home (Sahay and others 2020).
- In the authors’ sample, between 2014 and 2017 gender gaps in digital financial inclusion were narrowing in 31 of the 52 countries; in the other 21 countries they widened.

### Key drivers of the digital gender gap
- Lack of basic means to access digital services:
  - Limited access to mobile phones and the internet among women.
- Cultural norms limiting financial literacy:
  - Measured by the share of women who have completed upper secondary education.
- Low digital and technology-related literacy:
  - Share of women in STEM fields remains low at about 15 percent globally.

### Policy implications and research priorities
- Investing in digital and financial literacy should be high on the agenda of governments to mitigate emerging risks of new sources of financial exclusion due to the digital gender divide.
- Consumer protection agencies and regulators can play an active role in preventing explicit or implicit biases affecting women’s participation in digital finance.
- More research and better data are needed to identify conditions that facilitate the entry of women into leadership roles in the digital financial industry.
- Preliminary evidence shows a positive correlation between women leaders in fintech firms and the use of digital financial services by women, suggesting women leaders may spur development of services and products more targeted to women; more rigorous and in-depth work is required to confirm causal channels.

*Source: Purva Khera, Sumiko Ogawa, Ratna Sahay, and Mahima Vasishth, “The Digital Gender Gap,” Finance & Development, December 2022.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2022/december/ogawa.pdf_