If you want to save as much as 0.3 percentage points on your interest rates, close a loan with a bank employee of the same sex.
Thorsten Beck, professor at Tilburg University, claims that there is a measurable difference between how loan officers of microcredit lenders treat customers of the same and of the opposite sex. His report Sex and Credit: Is There a Gender Bias in Microfinance (PDF), co-written with Patrick Behr of the Brazilian business school Fundaco Getulio Vargas and Andreas Madestam of the Bocconi University in Milan, focused on lenders in Albania.
The reason they looked at microcredit lenders is because they do not use standard interest rates the way regular banks do.
The chance that opposite sex customers return for a second loan is 11.5 percent smaller, econtrack.nl reports.
The Dutch government bank specifically founded to get students their loans and bursaries, the Informatie Beheer Groep (literally: information management group) apparently accompagnies its folder on how to pay back with a cartoon that shows a waiter presenting a long bill to a fat guy who has just excessively gorged himself on food and wine. I am guessing the PR department ordered a cartoonist to create an amusing drawing to spruce up an otherwise boring folder, but the result is a rather patronizing message. As if university students need to be told that there is a cost associated with gluttony. (And indeed, students are presented as the stereotype of the partying care-for-nothing; can you imagine a political party advertising to get new members by showing a cartoon of a guy lighting cigars with bank notes freshly stolen from the public?)