Bankruptcy

Teresa Sullivan et al's book, As We Forgive Our Debtors (1989, see Chap 8, specifically) points out that women were not even guaranteed credit in their own names until 1970 (or 1974?), with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Domowitz and Sartain (2003) cite Sullivan et al's book on the lack of significant difference between men and women on debt/income ratios, but do not note the fact that a single-earner males who filed for bankruptcy had an average income 48% higher than single-earner females in the bankruptcy sample. Domowitz and Sartain do not report any effect of gender on the bankruptcy decision, but point out the difficulty of doing this when 50% of bankruptcy filings are married couples filing jointly. More recently, Linfeld (2008) (of the Institute for Financial Literacy) reported that American women were more likely to file for bankruptcy than American men in the year 2007, continuing "a trend we've seen since 2005."

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I can think of a number of factors that would influence a gender difference to declare bankruptcy between men and women: lower income, greater likelihood of dependents, and financial literacy seem like it would make bankruptcy more likely. Lower probability of being the sole breadwinner would make it less likely, although I wonder how relevant that is in the general population today. I seriously considered filing bankruptcy at a couple of points right after college. I had credit card debt, student loan debt, and an uninsured car accident settlement to pay off, and was working in theatre, which is code for "not even making living expenses." I did manage to get through that period without damaging my credit too badly, but I'm almost constantly surprised that I did.

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