Diagnosing Gender Norms in the Financial Market System: A Practical Guide

Executive Summary

As a subset of social norms, gender norms dictate what women can and cannot do, shaping their ability to access, use, and benefit from financial services. Gender norms influence the behaviors of all financial system market actors.[1] In Uganda, for example, financial services providers (FSPs) may deprioritize women customers based on assumptions that men control household finances, women lack financial decision-making power, and women are higher risk borrowers with limited asset ownership. When coupled with household restrictions, a female microentrepreneur may thus face sanctions ranging from community disapproval to increased domestic tensions for seeking a business loan without her husband’s knowledge. The impact of gender norms creates a reinforcing cycle where the same underlying beliefs about women’s roles and capabilities guide both individual behaviors and institutional practices.

The market system gender norms diagnostic employs an adaptive research approach that recognizes the complexity and interconnectedness of gender norms. This Technical Guide offers:

Insights on unlocking invisible barriers. Many women’s financial inclusion (WFI) initiatives focus on addressing visible constraints without recognizing the underlying gender norms that create them. This guide’s breakthrough approach reveals the hidden connections between social expectations, market behaviors, and systemic barriers. By illuminating how norms such as “men should control household finances” translate into specific actions by banks, regulators, and women themselves, the diagnostic findings can transform the way development actors[2] approach market constraints.

Practical tools for lasting change. This guide offers financial inclusion practitioners a powerful set of field-tested instruments for examining norms-driven constraints and identifying high impact intervention points. It begins with guidance on how development actors can attract and deploy the technical skills needed to conduct the required quantitative and qualitative research. Beyond that, and unlike traditional market assessments, the diagnostic approach next delves into identifying why women cannot access services even when they are physically available; why financial institutions maintain practices that exclude women, despite stated inclusion goals; and how regulatory frameworks unintentionally reinforce gender disparities. The guide builds on CGAP’s established framework for addressing gender norms and provides concrete guidance for the crucial first step of system diagnosis.

From theory to field-tested methodology. Real-world application across four diverse markets—Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda—refined the methodology into a robust, adaptable approach. What began as an exploration of how norms affect women’s choices evolved into a comprehensive, system-wide diagnostic that captures the complex interplay between all market actors. Led by CGAP in partnership with German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the FSD Network, the refinement process created a diagnostic approach that can identify opportunities for transformative change previously invisible in traditional market assessments. While completing a market system diagnostic demands significant investment—typically three to eight months and US$60,000 to $200,000—the unique insights gained can reveal important opportunities that traditional assessments miss, ultimately making a worthwhile investment in time and resources.

This practical guide presents a structured diagnostic approach to help development actors understand how gender norms create persistent barriers to WFI. Rather than simply assuming that low account ownership or limited credit access is due to expectations that are different for women than for men, the methodology examines how underlying norms shape all market actor behaviors. When development actors understand how gender norms influence the financial market system, they can design effective interventions that address the root causes of women being excluded or underserved. Developed through practical application and testing in the four countries noted above, the approach provides development actors with the tools they need to analyze norms-driven constraints and behaviors.

Gender norms diagnostic findings are particularly valuable to development actors (e.g., bilateral and multilateral donors, foundations, concessional investors; market facilitators such as FSD organizations and INGOs) aiming to develop program strategies to guide multiple projects and interventions. The findings integrate gender considerations into market system assessments to aid in understanding why existing interventions may struggle to achieve sustainable improvements and support long-term commitments to address structural barriers based on understanding the root causes of women’s exclusion.

To successfully carry out the diagnostic, development actors must:

• Align research design with local context. Ground research design and tools in local gender norms, market structures, and power dynamics; customize tools to local terminology.
• Dedicate adequate time to research preparation and implementation. Ensure sufficient time for training enumerators undertaking the interviews and other research staff and refining research tools; establish clear protocols for sensitive information and data coding; allow scheduling flexibility for stakeholder availability.
• Generate quality analysis through iteration. Use iterative approaches that combine gender and financial systems expertise, balancing methodological rigor with flexibility to capture complex relationships between norms and behaviors.
• Strategically engage stakeholders. Frame discussions through market opportunities, build early relationships with local champions, and tailor communications to different audiences.

To ensure quality results, development actors can adapt this guidance to their specific circumstances as they maintain its core principles. While the guide focuses on understanding how gender norms influence the financial market system, it provides the foundations for designing effective interventions that create sustainable WFI improvements by addressing the underlying norms that shape market behaviors. The CGAP companion Technical Guide, “From Insights to Interventions: Addressing Gender Norms in Women’s Financial Inclusion” (Ledgerwood et al. 2025), builds on the diagnostic guidance by providing step-by-step instructions to translate findings from market system gender norms diagnostics into actionable interventions.

[1] A market actor is any individual or organization—private or public sector—that performs a permanent function in a market system, including customers, FSPs, supporting function providers (e.g., credit bureaus) and rule makers that include financial sector authorities (e.g., regulators, supervisors, policymakers), and other authorities (e.g., telco regulators) and standard setting bodies.

[2] Development actors include bilateral and multilateral donors, foundations and concessional investors, and market facilitators such as financial sector deepening (FSD) organizations and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) that incentivize and enable market actors to more effectively perform their market functions and catalyze change, resulting in additional and more appropriate service delivery.