In the early 1970s, feminist activists were trying to mobilize American women against sexism in lending. The problem was, a lot of women didn’t clock what they were experiencing as unfair. 

“It’s hard to make sense of that kind of individual-level discrimination as a problem when it is just something you’ve become accustomed to,” said Chloe Thurston, a professor of political science at Northwestern University. 

According to Thurston, lots of women figured they just weren’t qualified for the credit cards, business loans and mortgages they were being denied. So, advocacy groups like the National Organization for Women started publishing op-eds in popular women’s magazines, like Glamour and and Ladies’ Home Journal, explaining what to look for and inviting women to share testimonials.

“Hundreds of women ended up writing in to recount their own tales of being discriminated against,” Thurston said. 

Many of those letters came from women struggling to take out loans and credit cards in their own names and without a male co-signer. 

In 1972, one woman wrote that “it did not matter that he had not worked at all during our marriage,” or that she was the sole earner in her household supporting her husband through graduate school. “The card had to be in his name.”

Some women described being denied credit or having their income discounted simply because they were of “married and of childbearing age.” Others were asked by loan officers to supply “baby letters” promising that a pregnancy would not disrupt their employment. 

“[I was] laughed at for thinking I could include my income as surety for a loan,” wrote one young married woman in New Jersey. “I was told I would have to show written proof from a doctor that I was on birth control pills … to the REAL ESTATE AGENT before he would show us any homes!”

Thurston compiled hundreds of these letters from NOW’s archives. Some of them appear in her book, “At the Boundaries of Homeownership.” 

“You can just imagine the humiliation, and a lot of women used that exact term, of being sort of regarded as someone whose main purpose was to get pregnant and to raise kids,” Thurston said. “And just not trusted as a financial operator in your own right.”

These stories made their way into the press and helped make the case for the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, or ECOA, which was signed into law 50 years ago this week. The law made it illegal for creditors to discriminate against applicants on the basis of sex or marital status and paved the way for American women to build their own financial lives.

“You can’t understate the significance of that,” said Greta Krippner, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. “Economic independence for women is a bedrock for every other form of human flourishing.”

Krippner said the ability to build credit and wealth outside of marriage to a man opened up new choices for women in other domains. 

“Career choices, relationship choices, choices over parenting or not — you know, everything that determines a life is conditioned on having some level of economic independence,” Krippner said. 

But another legacy of the ECOA is that it forced lenders to find new systems of evaluating creditworthiness. Jennifer Chien, Consumer Reports’ digital marketplace team, said the law pushed us more quickly toward the modern system of credit scoring. 

“Which, in theory, should be much more objective and unbiased,” Chien said. 

In reality, historic and systemic biases are embedded in credit scoring. Because of past redlining and discrimination, Chien said applicants of color and other disadvantaged groups can have thinner credit files and lower scores on average. 

Chien said the ECOA and other anti-discrimination laws have succeeded in rooting out the most overt bias in lending. 

“The remaining forms of discrimination show up in different ways and can be hard to pinpoint,” Chien said, like marketing that covertly targets borrowers of color with predatory loan products or discourages borrowers in Black neighborhoods from applying for mortgages. 

And Chien said new threats to equal credit access are emerging. 

“Algorithms can also discriminate,” Chien said, and there’s already evidence of artificial intelligence amplifying human biases in the financial sector. 

Unlike traditional credit scoring, Chien said AI models can evaluate applicants’ creditworthiness on hundreds of data points. 

“If the data that you use to train a model is unrepresentative of different groups or if there’s less data for certain groups, the resulting model may end up producing results that are worse for certain groups,” she said. 

The ECOA and other anti-discrimination laws don’t address that problem because the laws are decades old. 

“In an ideal world, these laws would be updated,” Chien said, to address not just unfair treatment, but adverse and disparate impacts in lending. 

Fifty years after the passage of the ECOA, Chloe Thurston at Northwestern said the days of women being openly locked out of credit markets feel impossibly distant. 

“We have no idea that these things happened and were so widespread and normalized, and this just wasn’t a very long time ago,” Thurston said. “In some ways, the legacy of the law is that we’ve forgotten about how recent and prevalent and overt discrimination was against women.”