George Price
Do men and women have different credit scores? The short answer is barely: as of 2020, women averaged a 704 credit score while men averaged 705, a gap so small it carries no real world meaning for borrowers of either gender.
At a Glance
- Women averaged a 704 credit score in 2020, men averaged 705, a one point gap.
- The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 bans lenders from weighing gender in underwriting, pricing or scoring.
- Men carried about 9% more total debt than women, roughly $338,000 versus $310,000.
- Women held slightly more student loan debt and averaged 4.5 credit cards versus 3.6 for men.
- Before 1974, women often needed a male cosigner to get a loan or credit card.
Why This Question Even Needs Legal Context
It sounds strange today, but women in the United States could not reliably open a line of credit or take out a loan on their own signature until fairly recently. Lenders routinely demanded a male cosigner, even for women with steady incomes. Buying a home came with an extra penalty too: women were frequently asked to put down larger down payments than men with comparable credit histories, simply because of their gender.
Congress ended that practice, at least on paper, with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. President Gerald R. Ford signed the bill into law, and it barred lenders from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age or receipt of public assistance income. The law reached into underwriting decisions, pricing, credit reporting and scoring models, stripping gender out of the equation entirely. That is precisely why solid data comparing men's and women's credit scores is so hard to come by: the law made it largely illegal for credit bureaus and lenders to track or use that information in the first place.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Despite those legal restrictions on collecting gender linked credit data, Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, published a report in 2020 called
Curtis Butler