This paper documents and analyzes the gender gap in the online credit market. Using data from Renrendai, a leading peer-to-peer lending platform in China, we show that lending to female borrowers is associated with better loan performance, including a lower probability of default, a higher expected profit, and a lower expected loss than for their male peers. However, despite the higher creditworthiness, we don't find any measurable gender impact on funding success rate, meaning that female borrowers have to compensate lenders by providing higher profitability to achieve a similar funding probability. These evidences indicate the existence of a gender gap that discriminate against female borrowers. Further analysis implies that this gender gap is independent of the amount of information disclosed by borrowers.

Employing 63,464 firm-year observations of 8876 companies in 22 countries from 2000 to 2013, we conduct a series of multiple regression analyses that reveal a significantly positive relationship between board gender diversity and dividend payouts. The empirical results confirm that board gender diversity facilitates corporate governance and consequently promotes dividend payouts. We also show that a good institutional environment may weaken the effect of board gender diversity on dividend payouts. Institutional ownership is positively associated with board gender diversity and that corporate dividend payouts increase when female senior executives have shareholdings. The findings of our analysis are robust after controlling for potential endogeneity concerns.