Given that women are underrepresented in the agent network, the preference for transacting with female agents could explain the gap in financial access and utilization among women. We explore potential reasons for gender homophily and find evidence consistent with gender assortative matching based on trust. Since the FINCA MFI agents see not only the amount transacted but also the customer’s account balance, women in particular may prefer to go to a female agent, especially when they have large balances or want to make high-value transactions. Qualitative research in the Democratic Republic of Congo and three other African countries highlights the importance of anonymity and the lack of traceability as an advantage of digital financial services (Butter and de Bruijn, 2017; Heitmann et al., 2018). Safeguarding privacy therefore provides a motive for customers to seek out agents whom they trust not to disclose their financial information to others. The role of trust in explaining assortative matching is consistent with the literature showing that women’s trust is more context sensitive than men’s (Croson and Gneezy, 2009; Eckel and Wilson, 2004; Bohnet 2007; Greig and Bohnet, 2009). To further validate our findings, we use data from an experiment with banking agents from a large MFI in Senegal (Buri et al., 2018) and find similar matching patterns: customers tend to transact with agents of their own gender and among women, the probability that female clients use female agents increases with the size of the transaction.

The results from our study contribute to several strands of the literature. First, to the best of our knowledge, we provide the first analysis of the salience of gender in transaction decisions when banking with agents. The results are consistent with Barr et al. (2012) who run a lab-in-the-field experiment in 14 Zimbabwean villages to examine group formation under different conditions. They also find evidence of assortative matching along gender and religious lines. Second, there is a nascent literature explaining differences in banking agent performance. Cull et al. (2018) find that environmental factors (low income, densely populated areas with high levels of commercial development) are more important than the personal characteristics of agents in explaining the transaction volumes handled by agents. The authors also speculate that gender could play a role in promoting comfort as female clients may be more at ease when doing banking transactions with a female agent, but they do not directly test this hypothesis. Our paper expands on this area of research outlined in Cull et al. (2018).<sup>2</sup>

> 2 This paper also relates to several studies suggesting that gender is relevant in different aspects of finance. In securities markets, males trade more aggressively than females, reducing their net returns in the process (Barber and Odean, 2001). Males are also more likely to hold stocks (rather than bonds) in their retirement portfolios (Sundén and Surette, 1998) and male corporate executives undertake more acquisitions and issue debt more often than female executives, though the announcement returns on those acquisitions and debt issues are lower for men than women (Huang and Kisgen, 2013). The literature also shows that MFIs with more women in their lending portfolios have lower default risk and higher repayment rates (D’Espallier et al., 2011). Credit decisions of female loan officers are associated with lower default rates than men’s (Beck et al., 2013) and MFIs with female executives have significantly higher outreach efficiency than MFIs with male directors (Hartarska et al., 2014).

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