Invisible Barriers: How Gender Norms Impact Financial Inclusion

Download the Annex

Executive Summary

Women across developing economies face formidable barriers to financial inclusion shaped by deeply ingrained gender norms, defined as shared social expectations that dictate appropriate behaviors for women and men. These powerful yet often invisible rules systematically limit women's access to and control over financial services throughout the entire financial ecosystem.

Gender norms create barriers to women's financial inclusion (WFI) not only by shaping women's behaviors but by influencing market actors who systematically reinforce restrictive expectations. Financial services providers (FSPs) assume men control household decisions and require spousal consent. Credit bureaus and mobile operators design services with male-default assumptions. Financial sector authorities establish frameworks that codify gendered expectations through collateral requirements and identification rules that women struggle to meet. Consistent and pervasive reinforcement across market actors means that addressing gender norms requires transforming how multiple actors in a market system behave, not just presenting isolated reforms within single institutions. When restrictive norms begin to shift, women gain improved access to and use of financial services. They experience greater agency in financial decision-making and control over resources. This enhanced WFI in turn contributes to broader economic empowerment outcomes for women. The relationship between norm change and women's economic empowerment (WEE) operates iteratively: as empowerment increases, it accelerates further positive shifts in norms and behaviors across the financial ecosystem.

Based on gender norms diagnostics conducted in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, this Focus Note presents a practical framework that classifies gender norms by their strength (the extent to which norms are rigidly held and the severity of sanctions when they are broken) and prevalence (the extent to which norms are widely recognized and followed by different actors) across market actors. This classification reveals four distinct norm types, each requiring tailored intervention strategies (see Figure 1):

1. Deeply entrenched norms (high strength, high prevalence,) require "circumvent norms" strategies that work around constraints through technology, alternative delivery models, and regulatory innovations. MiBank's privacy-focused digital accounts in Papua New Guinea exemplify this approach, achieving an account holder rate of 56 percent women by enabling women to privately open and manage accounts without spousal notification requirements, thus avoiding direct challenges to male authority (Tiwari and Mohammed 2020).
2. Shifting norms (high/variable strength, low prevalence,) call for "align expectations" strategies that help institutions catch up with evolving community attitudes. Access Bank Nigeria's cashflow-based lending eliminated traditional collateral requirements, recognizing that while communities increasingly accepted women as business owners, banks lagged behind with outdated policies (Gruver et al. 2024).
   
    
3. Flexible yet widespread norms (low/variable strength, high prevalence) enable "leverage positive deviants" strategies that amplify the more inclusive behaviors already present, such as community engagement, developing comprehensive value propositions that include financial and nonfinancial services, and mindset change approaches. The Women In Business (WIN) program in Mozambique used media to highlight successful women entrepreneurs, reaching 450,000 women and helping communities renegotiate women's economic roles without explicitly challenging existing norms (TechnoServe 2023).
4. Relaxing norms (declining strength and prevalence) benefit from "reinforce norm transformation" strategies that accelerate change already underway. Using data analytics, VP Bank Vietnam proved that women clients had a 25 percent higher lifetime value than men, accelerating institutional recognition of women's economic potential (FinEquity Webinar 2022).

This Focus Note includes illustrative examples from successful initiatives around the world that demonstrate the potential of these strategies—from digital financial solutions that respect privacy concerns to data-driven approaches that challenge institutional biases.

Development actors, including donors and market facilitators—and market actors such as FSPs and financial sector authorities—are not neutral observers but active participants in either reinforcing or transforming gender norms. Every policy, product, and procedure either challenges restrictive expectations or inadvertently strengthens them. The power to drive sustainable change lies not in convincing women to adapt to existing systems but in transforming those systems to work equitably.

The imperative is clear for development and market actors:

• Conduct or leverage gender norm diagnostics to understand how specific norms influence different market actors in their specific contexts, ensuring interventions address actual normative constraints rather than assumed constraints
• Examine and transform institutional practices by auditing and revising policies, procedures, and organizational culture through a gender lens to identify and eliminate barriers that inadvertently exclude women
• Design system-wide interventions that engage all stakeholders—women, men, community leaders, financial sector authorities, FSPs, and other institutions—rather than focusing only on changing women's behaviors
• Measure institutional change alongside individual outcomes by tracking how interventions transform market actor behavior in addition to measuring women's access to and use of financial services

Gender norms are already evolving. The critical question is whether financial sector actors will serve as active agents of positive transformation or passive perpetuators of constraints that limit women's potential and broader economic growth. The strategies in this Focus Note are practical tools for immediate implementation—and the time to act is now.