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In many countries, the gender gap is lower with mobile money than with traditional financial services and mobile money is helping with closing the gender gap[25]. Globally, 65% of women have an account compared with 72% of men. This means that women are 10% less likely than men to have a financial account. This number reaches 24% in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. However, in many, the gender gap in mobile money account ownership is lower than the gender gap in bank account ownership.

Using a novel fintech dataset for 114 economies worldwide, this International Monetary Fund (IMF) paper shows that fintech adoption significantly improves female employment and reduces gender inequality, the effect being more pronounced in firms without traditional financial access. Fintech not only increases the number and ratio of female employees in the workforce, but also mitigates financial constraints of female-headed firms. Digital divide and poor institutions weaken such benefits.