Most people reading this in 2021 would dismiss the sentence as ridiculous and archaic. Legally speaking, it is an outdated idea. However, due to various reasons like weak implementation of laws, lack of awareness, and discriminatory social practices, many women are still unable to realize their economic rights.

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Financial inclusion is a big part of achieving economic equality. It not only includes giving the legal right to financial products and services but also access to these rights when required. It also means raised awareness and literacy about the rights that have been granted, without which the rights are useless.

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The women’s rights movement has been in motion throughout all of our lifetimes. The first instance of the movement dates back to the Seneca Falls Convention, held in 1848, where 300 people gathered to outline a direction for the movement. Their demands included social, cultural, and economic equality between men and women.

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Fast-forwarding to the present – even though women have these basic rights by law in most countries, in practice they don’t always seem to apply in full. Recent research done in Chile by the Inter-American Development Bank found that a loan request submitted by a woman is 14.8 percent less likely to be approved compared to otherwise equivalent loan request submitted by a man. This is despite the fact that official statistics show that women in Chile have higher repayment rates than men. The only explanation for this discrepancy in approval rates is discrimination against women. The study also concludes that it is “taste – based” discrimination, that is, discrimination because the loan officer is biased towards men.

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The obvious effects of this discrimination are the adverse effects on women’s place in society, their economic growth, and their financial and social freedom. What most people do not see is that it also affects the world economy. The Chilean study estimated that 9.9 percent of expected bank profits are not realized due to gender discrimination (profit of US$ 13,400 lost for the bank per case of discrimination). The total cost equals to the annual wage bill of 1,500 loan officers or 18 percent of all loan officers working in the Chilean banking system.

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Globally, there were 1.7 billion people unbanked in 2017. This means that around 22% of the population at the time did not have a bank account. Out of this 56% were women and 59% of these women were not part of the labor force . That means there were 562 million unemployed women around the world with no bank accounts, who were not even trying to look for employment.

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There are various reasons why women do not participate in the economy. As stated in an article published on UN Women, over 2.7 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. There are economies that still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, economies that have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and economies where husbands can legally prevent their wives from working.

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Getting loans, owning land, having a bank account, and being able to have a job are basic services that every person should have access to and knowledge about. These are only a few examples where women are not utilized to their potential. In holding women society is hampering the world economy from realizing its full potential. There are many organizations and individuals working hard to reach the goal of social and economic equality, a goal to which we are not even close.

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