Credit Rating Agencies. An analysis from the perspective of gender inequalities

This document examines the role of credit rating agencies from a gender perspective, highlighting how their methodologies can deepen structural inequalities, particularly in countries of the Global South. The analysis shows how pressure to maintain or improve sovereign credit ratings can encourage austerity policies and cuts to health, education, social protection and care services, shifting greater responsibilities onto households and disproportionately onto women. In response to these shortcomings, the document calls for alternative credit rating frameworks that incorporate gender equality, social investment, climate resilience and sustainable development as relevant dimensions in assessing countries’ economic sustainability.

Author: Maria Syed

Descripción

Sovereign credit ratings do more than shape how markets perceive a country’s ability to repay its debt: they can also influence borrowing costs and the fiscal space available to sustain public policies. This document examines a still largely overlooked dimension of that power: its impacts from a gender perspective. By analysing the methodologies used by leading credit rating agencies, it explores how the prioritisation of short-term fiscal indicators and the failure to recognise care work can encourage decisions that reduce social investment, deepen inequalities and shift the costs of crises onto households and, in particular, onto women.

Published on September 24, 2026