Narrowing the Gender Gap in Mobile Banking

Mobile banking and related digital financial technologies can make financial services cheaper and more widely accessible in low-income economies, but gender gaps persist. This publication presents evidence from two connected field experiments in Bangladesh designed to encourage the adoption and use of mobile banking by poor, illiterate households. 

The study focuses on migrants and their families. Despite large differences between female and male migrants in income and education, the first experiment shows that a training program led to a similarly large, positive impact on mobile banking usage by female and male migrants, increasing usage rates for both by about 45 percentage points. A second experiment explores whether the way that the technology was introduced and explained made an additional difference in narrowing the gender gaps.