The Digitization of Banks Disproportionately Hurts Women Entrepreneurs

In 2017, we launched a research project in order to learn more about the effects of banks’ lending model transformations. We targeted a random sample of Swedish entrepreneurs (both men and women) who were applying for bank financing.Our results show that women face increased difficulty in accessing bank financing, and specifically that women’s entrepreneurship suffers heavily from the recent transformation among banks. In short, women entrepreneurs showed more of a need to engage in informal economic activities than men.