Is there still a gender gap when it comes to mortgages?  While single women have come a long way from the days when a man had to guarantee their mortgage, the Urban Institute thinks that they, or perhaps more correctly the industry, still have a long way to go.

Urban Institute researchers Laurie Goodman, Jun Zhu, and Bing Bai write that female only borrowers made up 20 percent of those taking a mortgage in 2014.  This is a group that is disproportionately minority and lower income yet are better than men at paying their mortgages.  Still they get no price break for this performance and are denied mortgages at higher rates than men.

While the share of female-only borrowers has declined slightly since the boom, it averaged 21.5 percent across the decade ending in 2014.  Male-only borrowers accounted for a 29 percent share and male-female borrowers (regardless of which was the primary name on the document) accounted for 48 percent.

Single borrowers, both male and female are more likely than paired male/female borrowers to be minorities and to live in low-income and minority communities but women have a greater likelihood to fall into each of these categories. One third are minorities and almost half live in low-income communities.   

The authors say this group of borrowers is more on the precipice financially and stands to gain tremendously from homeownership but additional and sometimes subtle barriers may stand in their way. A summary of credit profiles over the ten-year period shows single borrowers of both genders to have slightly less creditworthy numbers, but FICO scores were only a half-dozen points below the average for all borrowers and there was very little difference across loan-to-value (LTV) or debt-to-income (DTI) ratios.  There was significant difference in income, especially for single female borrowers ($69,220) compared to $94,720 for single males and $101,180 for all borrowers, but females' average loan size was also significantly lower ($176,410) than those given to men and their average was only slightly lower than the average ($208.430) across all borrowers.

When loans are analyzed however, 15.6 percent of single women and 15.0 percent of single men get so-called "higher priced loans" compared to 11.9 percent of the borrower universe and 7.9 percent of paired borrowers where the male is primary on the loan.

Since lenders base their decisions on credit profiles, the authors say it makes sense for a weaker profile to generate a higher rate and for solo female borrowers to face a higher denial rate than their male counterparts.  But, they ask, do their profiles accurately predict a risk of default?  Their analysis makes the answer clear that in the case of solo female borrowers they do not.

The Institute's researchers ran three analysis using 13 million solo female and 17 million solo male borrowers.  The analysis held steady the credit characteristics of loan lengths, interest rates, FICO scores, and LTV's to ensure apples-to-apples comparisons. In each analysis they found that white, African American, and Hispanic solo female borrowers consistently default less than their male counterparts.

So if single women are going a better job paying their mortgages than their credit profiles predict and if the price they are paying for their mortgages is based on those profiles, this means, they say, that single women borrowers are paying too much. They admit that the inequality does not translate into a significant financial burden, but the issue is that the dimensions relied upon to assess risk do not adequately capture off the differences.  This still has real consequences as those profiles are also used for loan approval and women generally face higher denial rates.  They conclude, "We need to develop more robust and accurate measures of risk to ensure that we aren't denying mortgages to people who are fully able to make good on their payments."