Garv Chawla

UG Scholar
ISBM, SGVU
Ms. Neha Saini
Assistant Professor
ISBM, SGVU

Abstract
This study aims to reduce ambiguity in theoretical and empirical underpinning by
synthesizing various knowledge concepts through a systematic review of barriers and
interventions to promote the financial inclusion of women. The surrounding literature is
vast, complex, and difficult to comprehend, necessitating frequent reviews. However, due to
the sheer size of the literature, such reviews are generally fragmented focusing only on the
factors causing the financial exclusion of women while ignoring the interventions that have
been discussed all along. Filling up this gap, this study attempts to provide a bird’s-view to
systematically connect all the factors as well as mediations found in past studies with the
present and future. PRISMA approach has been used to explain various inclusions and
exclusions extracted from Scopus & WOS databases with the backward and forward
searches of important studies. Collaborative peer review selection with a qualitative
synthesis of results is used to explain various barriers and interventions in financial inclusion
that affected women’s empowerment in the period 2000–2020. Out of 1740 records
identified, 67 studies are found eligible based on systematic screening for detailed
investigation. This study has identified patriarchy structures, psychological factors, low
income/wages, low financial literacy, low financial accessibility and ethnicity as six
prominent barriers and government & corporate programs/ policies, microfinance, formal
saving accounts & services, cash & asset transfer, self-help groups, and digital inclusion as six
leading interventions to summarize the literature and highlight its gaps.

Introduction
All over the world, women bear an inadequate load of poverty because of social and
structural hurdles. A longdated body of literature (Klasen, 1999; Dollar and Gatti, 1999;
Klasen and Lamanna, 2009; Seguino, 2010) emphasizes the effect of numerous facets of
gender inequality and economic growth. Females are found to be less educated, less paid,
less on ownership and able to exercise much less economic control than their male
counterparts. This discrimination, especially in education, hampers their financial
development, leading to income inequality (Gonzales et al., 2015). Consequently, women
suffer from lack of health, education, work opportunities and control over their own lives
and selections (Kabeer, 1999) Nevertheless, we are observing a critical drive to achieve
gender equality, with 193 United Nations member countries committing to achieving the
sustainable development goal (SDG 5) of ending gender inequality issues by 2030. Realizing
that women’s empowerment benefits not only women but also the sustainable
development of the community (Vithanagama, 2016), numerous banks all over the world,
such as Westpac in Australia, ICICI and SBI in India, Natwest in the UK, and UNITAR in Kenya,
have developed products and services designed especially for women, keeping in mind their
security, accessibility and affordability. To make the most of this, we need more extensive
literature exploration to enable conceptually strong evidence-based solutions catalyzing
women’s mobility from poverty and exploitation. Considering the vastness of literature, this
can only be addressed by a scientific approach to review, which has been followed in the
present study. However, due to the sheer size of the related literature, previous reviews
(Holloway et al., 2017, Kalaitzi et al., 2017, Roy and Patro, 2022) are found to be fragmented
as their results focused only on the factors causing the financial exclusion of women while
ignoring the interventions that have been discussed all along. Therefore, filling up this gap
our review paper aims to scientifically identifying and amalgamating the related studies
between 2000 and 2020 with the objective of (a) identifying the nature of major barriers, (b)
exploring the most useful mediations/interventions and trends in research on the financial
inclusion (FI) of women to enable the community to design thoughtful interventions for
them. The economic empowerment of women was explored in various dimensions at a
much greater pace after 2000 (Priya et al., 2021). This inspired us to focus on the research
work and other initiatives taken in the following 2 decades, defining our study period 2000–
2020. Many influential articles have been published in journals dedicated to women and
general development, such as World Development1 , Feminist Economics2 , Journal of
Development Economics3 and Gender & Development4 . However, despite tremendous
progress in the global state of FI, the gap in gender has not changed much since 2011, as a
6% difference still exists in access to Bank accounts among men and women in developing
countries (Demirguc-Kunt et al., 2022), raising the need for considerate customized
mediation. Early studies on financial empowerment of women. Professor Irene Tinker’s work
in women studies in the 1960s and 70s is the foundation for research on women
development studies. Her work was instrumental in bringing about the first United Nations
International conference on Women in 1975, which is also marked as International women’s
year. She also founded the International Centre for Research on Women in 1976, which
promotes empirical research to advocate evidence-based ways to empower women and
promote gender equality. Research in the 1970s was characterized by pioneer studies that
highlighted the role of women in economic development (Boserup, 1970; Tinker, 1976),
while the 1980s captured the role of females in family structures (Acharya and Bennett,
1981), the hardships faced by women in agriculture, which was identified as the single most
important employment-generating sector for women (Staudt and Jaquette, 1982), and the
advancement of land rights for women (Agarwal, 1988). In the 1990s, research gathered
pace with numerous studies about the persisting gender inequalities (Tinker, 1990, 1999;
Sen, 1990; Buvinić and Gupta, 1994; Mehra, 1997, Mayoux, 1998; Pande, 1999) in
cooperatives (Sen, 1990), financial services and microlevel entrepreneurship (Mehra and
Gammage, 1999), and discriminations in agriculture and land rights of women to bring about
sustainable development and suggest inclusive policies and practices (Mehra, 1995).
Providing a much need direction and empirical advancement, Kabeer, 1999 proposed the
measurement of women’s empowerment with the identification of the ‘resources’ they own,
the ‘agency’ or commanding role they have and their ‘achievement’, which can be
understood as the outcome in terms of well-being as the basic constructs to be observed.
This is one of the most cited articles in the context of studies about the economic
empowerment of women. By the end of the decade, the World Bank’s research report
presented a cross-country comparison of the impact of gender inequalities on growth and
development (Klasen, 1999), thus introducing crucial insights into the geographical diversity
of the issue. Thus, the literature around the financial empowerment of women began with
recognizing the crucial role of women in the commercial progress at macro level then; it
started to realize their critical role at family level and nature of their contribution at social
level, which highlighted gender inequalities. Various dimensions in which such
discrimination existed were identified giving scope to future researchers to explore various
barriers in the way of women development and to develop suitable policy interventions.

Research methodology
Systematic reviews must follow the preset protocol, which is an advance plan of action
specifying the methods to be used in the study and is generally accepted as a research
design in social science studies. These rules are crucial to avoid researcher bias in data
selection and analysis and increase the reliability of reviews (Xiao and Watson, 2019). In this
section, we have described systematic steps undertaken to extract data using specific
channels, keywords, inclusion & exclusion criteria and expert selection explained through
the PRISMA framework (Fig. 1). Further, the studies thus extracted have been classified and
synthesized qualitatively for deeper insights. Channel used for literature search. Literature
for this review has been found using the two sources suggested by Xio and Watson in 2019.
These sources are: 1. Electronic database—Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus. WOS has the
longest indexing coverage from 1900 to the present (Li et al., (2010) while Scopus has an
extensive coverage of good quality academic work (Gavel and Iselid, 2008). A literature
search using both databases despite the overlapping articles is still recommended to avoid
missing out high-impact documents (Vieira and Gomes, 2009). Extractions from Scopus and
WOS for this study were made on January 30, 22. 2. Backwards and forward search—Articles
cited in important studies (highly cited) were traced to identify the inspiration and key
background variables, likewise the articles that cited important studies were explored to
determine the direction of the flow of research. (Webster and Watson, 2002; Haddaway et
al., 2022). Also, publications by key authors (highly cited) who contributed to the pool of
knowledge were identified to ensure that all their important studies were included.
Fig. 1 The PRISMA Framework for this systematic review. Our initial result of 1734
documents (results as on 30 January 2022) was filtered by including only peer reviewed
open access, full text English articles on Financial inclusion and women empowerment,
resulting in 67 eligible documents. (author created)

Results
To achieve our research objectives, the selected articles were classified as barrier-related
studies, experimental studies and studies evaluating interventions, with a few studies
covering more than one dimension (Fig. 2). Tabular synthesis. In Table 3 below, we have
classified and connected 67 eligible articles based on their contribution to developing
different perspectives about barriers and interventions in FI-based women empowerment.
Additionally, twenty-four experimental studies during 2000–2020 are presented in a tabular
form (Table 4) for review. For the purpose of our study, only the gender-based findings are
listed for each study. Owing to the high level of heterogeneity of quantitative data, we could
not conduct a meta-analysis; instead, we summarized studies based on their characteristics,
factors, mediations and results (Bohren et al., 2015). Qualitative synthesis. The ideas
forwarded through the tabular classifications in the studies of FI and WE have been knit to
arrive at a thematic discussion about barriers, intervention-based studies and intervention
types, which are the three main dimensions of our study. Barriers to financial empowerment
of women. Women have been suppressed and exploited physically, socially, mentally and
economically for a long time. Developing countries particularly have a patriarchal set up
where women are seen second to men (Nagindrappa and Radhika, 2013). While there is a
section of society that encourages women empowerment, numerous barriers continue to
restrict their advances. Through our set of identified studies, we have presented below a
discussion about various barriers that have been found through the discussion to be
interlinked and often cyclical in nature. Figure 3 highlights the scope of our further
discussion about the barriers to FI in women.

Patriarchy structures: Patriarchy is a socio-ideological concept in which men in the family

(father, brother, husband, son, etc.) are considered to be superior to women. It is also
described as a social arrangement in which men (patriarchs) dominate, oppress and exploit
women (Walby, 1989). Delving into the subject of patriarchy, noted author, Naila Kabeer,
2015 pointed to two types of inequities against women. First, gender mediated social class-
based violence, rape and other sexual exploitation that women get subject to, and second,
domestic violence due to scarcity or poverty and related helplessness of males within the
household. The abuse of women does not stem from scarcity or poverty; even affluent
families exploit their daughters by denying them their land and property rights. The Indian
government introduced a gender-progressive inheritance law to combat this injustice;
despite the reforms, parents continued to deprive their daughters of their rights based on
emotions and compensation in the form of higher education and higher dowries (Roy et al.,
2015). This ill treatment of woman, which starts from her parental abode, continues in her
husband’s house, where the ordered unequal power relations developed out of patriarchy
further diminish her position. Her production, reproduction and sexuality are controlled by
men. This biased treatment of women in the household adversely affects all levels of her
social interactions, depriving her of access to resources and opportunities (Manta, 2019;
Ghosh and Günther, 2018) and financial independence (Schaner, 2017). Psychological
factors: For obvious reasons, as discussed under the previous heading, many women lose
self-confidence and selfesteem and perceive opportunities with fear of failure (Koellinger et
al., 2008). An experimental study found that females in the lower income group tend to be
more risk averse than their male counterparts and think about the negative consequences of
not being able to pay back loans. (Manta, 2019) Thus, psychological factors must be carefully
studied as crucial drivers of the FI of women (Kavita and Suman, 2019). It was found that
investment pattern, group experience and age impacted women’s perception about barriers
to FI (Lombe et al., 2012), and attitude could be explained by personality traits, ability to
cope-up, resource utilization, entrepreneurial abilities, organizational control, financial
inclusion and economic betterment (Patil and Kokate, 2017). Low income/wages: Although
the concepts of income inequality and gender have been discussed separately in the
literature, they cannot be compartmentalized, as they keep interacting by the way of
inequality in outcomes and opportunities, which are a byeproduct of inequalities mainly in
education, financial access, social structures and individual perspectives. With the biasness
of patriarchy and her own fallen self-esteem, a woman’s low negotiation and bargaining
power leads her to enter into the social contracts where she is able to earn a low level of
income and wages compared to men for the same work. This discrimination is popularly
referred to as the “glass ceiling” and is experienced by women at all levels of hierarchy. This
reminds us of the much-discussed US presidential elections in 2016, where former U.S.
Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was subject to misogynistic attacks indicating
to her being too weak to serve the nation’s highest office. (Marie et al., 2017). Hence,
women being exploited at work in terms of work treatment and low wages are no exception.
At lower levels of education and power, gendered wage gaps are even more pronounced
(Gonzales Martínez et al., 2020) and are found to further contribute to financial exclusion
(Ghosh and Vinod, 2017) and further impede the economic growth of women. Low financial
literacy: With cyclical interconnections with all other barriers to the financial empowerment
of women, financial literacy has been much discussed by researchers. Hung, A. et al, 2009
combined all previous definitions of financial literacy to express it as “knowledge of basic
economic and financial concepts, as well as the ability to use that knowledge and other
financial skills to manage financial resources effectively for a lifetime of financial well-being.”
Successive studies have recognized financial awareness, financial knowledge, financial skills,
financial attitude and financial behavior as key factors in determining financial literacy
(Kumari and Azam, 2019) Financial literacy has been supported as one of the critical factors
to bring about FI and has greater importance for increasing economic empowerment among
women, especially the rural poor (Gonzales et al., 2015; Montanari and Bergh, 2019; Kumari
and Azam, 2019; Kaur and Kapuria, 2020), who in the lack of it make wrong choices and
become vulnerable to high financial risks (Manta, 2019). With a lack of financial knowledge
and skills, women cannot access financial services and the benefits of the formal financial
system, making them economically dependent on men and confined to the vicious circle of
low investments, low income and low profits (Manta, 2019). Montanari and Bergh, 2019
found that the participation of women in the earnings and decision-making activities of rural
cooperatives was almost nonexistent. It insisted that women’s roles in such institutions were
restricted to low-cost or free physical labor, while those who benefited were literate and
generally educated people. Spatial diversity and related factors play an important role in the
effective communication of financial literacy. Gendered gaps in education were found to be
greatly related to the general variation in educational achievement across countries,
signifying a shortage of access to education. (Gonzales et al., 2015). A cross-regional
comparison showed high-level gendered discrimination based on education level and
economic participation in South Asia. Observations in Asian countries indicate lessening of
the gendered employment gap with the rise in gendered education levels, while in the
Middle East and North Africa (MENA), gender gaps in education have decreased, yet women
have not obtained opportunities in employment (Klassen and Lamanna, 2009). This result
hints at the presence of interwoven barriers that are passed on locally. Overall, a high level
of financial literacy is expected to result in greater economic participation of women, where
she has an opportunity to express her thoughts and receive suggestions about investment
avenues and updates about new profitable products and services, encouraging her towards
group effort and informed financial behavior (Ingale and Paluri, 2020), which in turn
improves her relative wealth (Doss et al., 2020) and empowers her. Low financial
accessibility: Access to bank accounts, savings instruments, and other financial amenities
may result in women’s better control of their earnings, personal consumption and
commercial expenditure (Bernasek, 2003), and lack of it pushes her back to obscurity. This
was exemplified in an experimental study in Kenya that found that credit constraint
prevented women from starting a business and savings constraint further barred them from
sustaining it (Brudevold et al., 2017). While trying to develop within the male dominant
society, a woman is subject to biases that pull down her self-confidence hurling her into the
loop of less education, low employment and low wages, denying her the benefits of access
to formal finance such as credit, deposits, insurance, payments and other risk management
services (Demirguc-Kunt et al., 2022). Findings in an Africa-based study indicate that access
to formal finance is mainly driven by individual characteristics such as education, age,
income, residence area, employment status, marital status, household size and degree of
trust in financial institutions (Soumare et al., 2016). Most of the above factors have been
identified as obstacles for the FI of women, thus emphasizing women’s overall lack of
opportunity to access finance. Women’s lack of access to financial products and services
may also happen because of the absence of a bank branch in rural areas that are not
commercially viable for banking. Marginalized women living in underdeveloped far-flung
areas with poor infrastructure and roads find it hard to regularly visit bank branches in other
areas (Manta, 2019), so they avoid banking altogether. This problem was addressed by
Mueller et al. in 2020, who worked to develop a travel time model to indicate market
accessibility, which is the summary travel time to the nearest state capital city in hours. Such
indicators may help in planning inclusion strategies. Another major reason for women’s lack
of access to finance is the lack of commercial interest of banks in disbursing small credit to
poor women with no credit history or collateral. Such lending may lead to the building up of
non-performing assets and eventually high losses for banks. Therefore, they avoid giving
loans to underprivileged women depriving them of economic opportunities. Moreover, the
absence of collateral with women is further enhanced by biased traditional property rights
(Manta, 2019), which denies her resources to build upon a better future. Looking at the
brighter side, ambitious efforts are being made through pathways such as microfinance
(Kemp and Berkovitch, 2020) and digital inclusion to pull women out of these neverending
and self-building barriers. Ethnicity: In recent studies, ethnicity has emerged as an important
factor to be considered while promoting FI in women. Gonzales Martínez et al. (2020)
conducted a controlled laboratory experiment in Bolivia to evaluate whether credit officers
in microfinance institutions rejected loan applications on the basis of the interaction of
gender and ethnicity of potential buyers. Although the study supported that women were
benefitting from microcredit, it indicated discrimination based on ethnicity, as
nonindigenous women had twice the probability of getting loan approved, whereas
indigenous women had only 1.5 times the probability of getting loan approved compared to
men. This idea was supported by another contemporary study (Kaur and Kapuria, 2020),
suggesting that households headed by females belonging to socially underprivileged
backgrounds had a poorer likelihood of obtaining finance from institutions. This suggests
that important insights for FI for women can be derived from ethnic studies. Experimental
studies on women’s financial empowerment. As the researchers identified various variables
related to the financial empowerment of women through exploratory and descriptive
studies, a number of empirical and experimental studies were undertaken to understand the
relationship between them. The three main types of interventions identified during our
analysis were as follows:

Consequences of No Women empowerment

Denial of education and long-term impacts on human capital. Physical and psychological
health risks. Perpetuation of intergenerational poverty. Violation of children's rights and
dignity. Undermining of sustainable development goals.

Prevalence and Trends

Regional disparities in child labour prevalence. Gender differentials in types of work and
vulnerabilities. Shifts in child labour patterns due to globalization and technological changes.
Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on child labour rates.

Policy Responses and Interventions:

Legislative frameworks and enforcement mechanisms. Education and social protection
programs. Awareness-raising and advocacy campaigns. Supply chain monitoring and
corporate social responsibility initiatives. International conventions and multi-stakeholder
partnerships.

Future scope for research

The 67 studies discussed in this work have exposed many gaps in the related literature. As
we have found that all the barriers are inter-related and cyclical, there is a need to break the
cycle. Our findings can help future researchers to develop deeper insights about each of the
highlighted barrier. A few future areas for research have been identified as: Meaningful and
important insights can be derived from ethnic studies to measure the impact of cultural
institutions such as women’s dress codes and their expected public behavior on the level of
their economic participation. Exploration of behavioral irrationality of rural women towards
financial products and services. Biasness at the workplace in terms of income, authority and
leadership should be explored further to devise suitable interventions. The perception,
attitude, and behavior of women towards finance have been evaluated in many studies, but
not much has been discussed to understand the supply-side psychological hurdles at the
individual level in disbursal of finance. Likewise, our results suggest and discuss the
evaluation of most effective interventions, which can help researchers to understand the
way these mediations have developed so far and the way in which they can be improvised.
Some future areas, which may be explored in theory may be: The usefulness of online
education to promote financial literacy and awareness in the remote corners of countries
and across countries. The lack of discussion about insurance products to mitigate risk and
encourage investments among women can be addressed. There is a need to discuss security,
transparency and awareness in digital financial services along with thoughtfully designing
simpler digital interfaces, tools and devices customized for women. Moreover, as the
problem of the FI of women has evidently been discussed primarily in developing nations,
there is a need for exploration studies about poor or indigenous women in developed
countries. Conclusion Thus, offering a deeper insight to the subject of Women
empowerment through Financial Inclusion, we have identified six prominent barriers to FI of
women: patriarchy structures, psychological factors, low income/wages, low financial
literacy, low financial accessibility and ethnicity and have uniquely found that these barriers
are interconnected with cyclical impact, resulting in redistribution effects that further widen
the gaps between the privileged and the underprivileged, which must be considered while
designing interventions in future. Similarly, we have recognized six main interventions that
have been introduced thus far: government and corporate programs/ policies, microfinance,
formal saving accounts/services, cash or asset transfer, self-help groups and digital inclusion
and have presented various methods and findings of related experimental researches to
provide direction for future inquiry. The consequences, appreciation and criticism of various
interventions have been documented in the results and discussion to provide useful vision
for future policy or theoretic implementation. Overall, this study has exclusively presented a
summary of the barriers and interventions, which have been inquired into during 2000–2020
thereby contributing to achieving sustainable development goal (SDG 5) of ending gender
inequality issues by 2030.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its
supplementary information file.

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