Are banks sexist the way they apply income multiples for mortgages?

Primrose

I think it's highly possible there's an element of sexism here but probably the reality is that until men are capable of child bearing, women will always be the sex who have lower earning salaries and less consistent earning opportunities because their careers suffer as a result of having the main responsibility for child care.
Whether there is a moral issue here or not I'm not sure but there's certainly a practical one. As I'm a saver (and many people are) we want our banks to lend to low risk borrowers. So even though I'm a woman, I wouldn't want the bank which holds my savings to loan money to a woman at the same multiple as a man if I thought she would be at greater risk of not being able to repay a higher multiple mortgage loan. It's a difficult one, but the sub prime mortgage scandal which recently bought the global banking system to its knees was caused by banks loaning money to high risk borrowers. So whether they were women, self-employed people who lied about their self-certification income, or other high risk borrowers, there is a good reason to differentiate between low risk borrowers and high risk borrowers, whatever gender they are.

Cazza

chirpchirp wrote: »

Aside to the original post, I find it interesting that my lender states income in their calculator but will only consider salary.

I suspect this is not the case though. All lenders will accept a proportion of bonuses and overtime, which are not part of your basic salary. There are many other income streams that lenders will accept too. It's simply a case of knowing the different policies which are applied by differenct lenders.