Cultural Foundations of Creditworthiness: Gendered Evaluations of Borrowers in Colombian Microcredit

McNeill, Kristen

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Year:: 2022
Contributor:: McNeill, Kristen (creator); Schrank, Andrew (Advisor); Short, Susan (Reader); Hirschman, Daniel (Reader); Chorev, Nitsan (Reader); Doering, Laura (Reader); Brown University. Department of Sociology (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Gender; Debtor and creditor; Microfinance; Economic sociology; Economic development--Sociological aspects; Sociology of gender; Cultural sociology
Extent:: xiv, 148 p.

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Abstract:: Credit and creditworthiness are increasingly consequential in the global North and South alike. For over 139 million people, many of whom are excluded from mainstream financial institutions, credit has come in the form of small uncollateralized loans known as microcredit. A longstanding challenge in microcredit has been the gap between promises of transformative change for women and gender relations, and the mixed reality of its effects. An explanation for this incongruence requires taking a closer look at loan officers. Accessing credit virtually always involves a financial intermediary; decisions about loans are filtered through loan officers who are front-line gatekeepers of access to credit. In this dissertation, I center these financial intermediaries and ask: How do loan officers make decisions about who is creditworthy? I use a unique combination of original data collected from a microcredit provider in Colombia, including in-depth interviews, observations, administrative data, and text data, with a particular focus on how evaluations of creditworthiness may be affected by the borrower’s gender. I argue that standards and perceptions of creditworthiness privilege existing gender and family norms, operating through a combination of institutional and cultural criteria. Institutional criteria, namely clients’ businesses and credit histories, are structurally gendered given that on average, women have smaller businesses and less credit history. When institutionally legible financial records are unavailable or insufficient to determine creditworthiness, loan officers invoke a shared cultural schema, which I term the ideal borrower. For both men and women, the patriarchal nuclear family is most desirable, though for different reasons, effectively placing men and women in different ideal positions as economic actors. While microcredit is more accessible than mainstream credit, these findings suggest that its potential to transform or revolutionize gender relations is constrained by the fact that existing gender norms and barriers are embedded in the logic of resource allocation. These findings confirm that gender remains a relevant line of differentiation in the microcredit market, and demonstrate that family is an additional axis of differentiation that intersects with gender in ways that advantage some women and men over others.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2022

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Citation

McNeill, Kristen, "Cultural Foundations of Creditworthiness: Gendered Evaluations of Borrowers in Colombian Microcredit" (2022). Sociology Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:h2ef8avx/

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Sociology Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Sociology department.
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