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.
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