Most financial sector authorities (FSAs), especially in emerging markets and developing economies, pursue at least 10 mandates and objectives, from core ones like promoting safety and soundness and financial stability, to consumer protection, financial inclusion, competition, sustainability, and capital markets development.
To fulfil each mandate, FSAs must take timely and proportionate regulatory and supervisory actions that rely not only on their technical expertise and capacity, but also lean heavily on high-quality data. In this context, we believe gender data is key to helping FSAs incorporate a valuable gender angle into their supervisory analyses, enabling better fulfillment of their diverse mandates.
Incorporating gender into regulatory data will help FSAs meet their objectives
As argued in a previous blog, FSAs cannot see the whole picture of market dynamics and take evidence-based actions when they do not collect gender-disaggregated data and conduct gender-informed analysis. FSAs can collect a wide array of data from regulated entities, including administrative and transaction customer-level data and financial and operational business-level data. This business-level data can cover all sectors (banking, credit, payments, insurance, pensions, and capital markets) and all provider operations with individuals and micro and small enterprises. Granular regulatory gender data can “speak” on behalf of consumers and produce rich knowledge to support multiple purposes within and across FSA mandates.
Several FSAs already collect regulatory gender data for financial inclusion purposes, including monitoring and public dissemination (e.g., public dashboards in Colombia and Rwanda). At the same time, gender-disaggregated data is rarely collected and used in support of other mandates such as consumer protection or stability. Without gender data, FSAs would remain unable to recognize gender-differentiated patterns in their risk assessments and thus miss the ways that data can strengthen supervision, regulation, and policymaking effectiveness.
Gender data is an imperative for customer-centric consumer protection
With the expansion of digital financial services, many FSAs are adopting a more customer-centric approach to consumer protection that helps them identify, assess, monitor, prevent, and mitigate consumer risks and ensure that consumers attain positive outcomes from their experiences with financial products, services, and providers. This approach entails collecting, analyzing, and disseminating gender-sensitive indicators covering several topics (e.g., disclosure, suitability, redress, privacy, fair treatment, customer mobility, competition) and sectors (e.g., deposit, credit, insurance, payments). This information can help FSAs answer questions on how consumer experiences, risks, and outcomes vary by gender, which can later help FSAs take supervisory, enforcement, and regulatory actions that aim to increase trust in the financial sector.
For example, FSAs may ask:
- Do women experience higher rejection rates in product applications, insurance claims approvals, or complaint admissions?
- Are there gender differences in reported fraud, amount of penalty and other fees, collateral requirements, complaints, or claims turnaround time?
- Do women present higher non-repayment rates?
Some FSAs are already doing these analyses – the Chilean pension supervisor found that women who transferred their funds to another pension fund administrator received lower returns than men, and the Colombian financial supervisor’s indicators on consumer credit show that transgender borrowers received about four percentage point higher interest rates than the average borrower in 2024.
FSAs can use gender data to explore potential connections between stability risks and gender within the customer base and among the workforce
Analysis of gender patterns could improve FSAs’ identification, assessment, and mitigation of provider-level and system-level risks. For example, at the provider level, gender-sensitive indicators can enrich the analysis of prudential risks (e.g., credit, liquidity, operational, and solvency) and provider performance (e.g., ROE, ROA) via questions, such as:
- Does credit risk vary by customer gender?
- Does the insurance claim ratio vary by customer gender?
- How are fraud and operational risks related to customer gender distribution?
- Does agent fraud correlate with agent gender?
- Does greater gender diversity lead to better risk management and hence greater stability?
- Should gender be considered a relevant factor in supervisory risk assessments?
These analyses can then help FSAs improve or issue new policies, regulations, or guidance, strengthen supervisory and enforcement actions, or design fraud awareness activities. For instance, the Mexican banking supervisor lowered the loan loss reserve requirements for loans granted to women, as data showed they had lower non-performing ratios.
Capital market development analysis could be strengthened by incorporating a gender lens
FSAs can use gender-disaggregated regulatory data to improve efforts to develop capital markets by increasing their breadth, depth, efficiency, and innovation. This is done by analyzing the gender patterns of investors and issuers vis-à-vis trading trends. With gender data, FSAs can answer questions such as:
- What demographics are driving market growth, and via which types of instruments?
- Are women-led microenterprises benefiting from crowdfunding options?
- Are they more likely to pay higher returns but still raise lower amounts?
- Are female investors more likely to invest in bonds issued or crowdfunding projects presented by women-led microenterprises?
- How do online trading platforms compare with traditional channels in attracting new female issuers and investors?
FSAs can also use gender data to inform sustainability analyses and other purposes
FSAs may disaggregate by gender many system-level indicators they publish in financial stability reports, annual reports, and other statistical compilations. They may also use and disseminate providers’ gender diversity and pay gap indicators in line with sustainability mandates. For instance, the European Banking Authority’s guidelines on internal governance require using gender-sensitive indicators as part of efforts to strengthen providers’ risk culture and management.
Gender-sensitive sustainability indicators improve FSA’s understanding of the relevance of gender for climate and environmental issues, such as trends in green financial products (e.g., loans, bonds, and insurance), the carbon footprint of loans, and insurance coverage gaps. When analyzed together, these indicators help answer questions such as:
- Are more gender diverse providers more likely to support climate-vulnerable customers and communities that play a key role in fighting climate change?
FSAs may publish sustainability indicators about themselves, too, and assess how gender diversity and pay gaps play a role in supervisory and regulatory outputs such as the number of licenses or authorizations issued, responses to consumer communications, or enforcement actions.
In conclusion, as the financial landscape grows more complex, integrating gender into regulatory data will help FSAs fulfill all their mandates more effectively, contributing to a more inclusive, responsible, safe, and sustainable financial sector.
