Gender and Microfinance in Colombia

Guest lecture by Kristen McNeil of the Geneva Graduate Institute.

Abstract:  Access to finance is increasingly crucial for individuals and businesses, and virtually always involves a financial intermediary as the connection point between resource-rich institutions and the people seeking access. Understanding the work of these intermediaries is of particular importance when considering the profound gender inequalities in access to finance. Using interviews and observational data with loan officers at a microlender in Colombia, I investigate how financial intermediaries come to their highly consequential decisions in the face of limited information and a high degree of uncertainty. I find that loan officers draw heavily on a gendered cultural schema – which I term the ideal borrower – to connect family with expected financial behavior, and that this schema rewards patriarchal, heteronormative family structures over others. As a result, the ideal borrower both draws on and reinforces existing gender roles and inequalities in access to finance. These findings demonstrate how financial evaluations can be gender-neutral in theory but deeply gendered in practice, speak to how cultural and financial factors intersect to shape evaluations, and connect to broader conversations about the cultural foundations of economic inequalities.