Research Report Women Are Better Than Men At Paying Their Mortgages
Laurie Goodman, Jun Zhu, Bing Bai
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Female-only borrowers pay more for their mortgages than male-only borrowers, because they have weaker credit characteristics and a higher percentage of those loans are subprime. Our analysis shows, however, that these weaker credit characteristics do not accurately predict how well women pay their mortgages. Instead, female-only borrowers are doing a better job of paying their mortgages than their credit characteristics predict. Moreover, female-only borrowers have a higher denial rate, suggesting we need to develop more robust and accurate measures of risk to ensure that we aren’t denying mortgages to women who are fully able to make good on their payments. This is particularly important because more than one-third of female-only borrowers are minorities and almost half of them live in low-income communities.

Research Areas Wealth and financial well-being Social safety net
Tags Families with low incomes Asset and debts Housing markets Homelessness Single-family finance Credit availability Wealth inequality Financial products and services Women and girls Men and boys Finance
Policy Centers Housing Finance Policy Center