David Solomon, Goldman Sachs’s CEO, on Thursday forcefully denied customer allegations of gender bias in setting credit limits for the Apple Card.
Cathy Chan for Bloomberg News:
“There’s no gender bias in our process for extending credit,” Solomon told Bloomberg TV in an interview on Thursday from the New Economy Forum in Beijing. “There’s no question that different applicants can get different results, and that can be for a variety of reasons.”
Solomon’s blunt defense of the card signaled confidence in the face of demands from some U.S. lawmakers, including Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, that the company provide more information on whether its computer models may be unintentionally cementing decades of gender bias when helping to issue the card.
Tech entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson set off the furor with a viral tweet saying he was allowed to borrow 20 times as much as his wife, even though he has a lower credit score and they reported the same income.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote earlier this month, this has nothing to do with gender and everything to with Goldman only issuing individual accounts (which, of course, allowed family members to be assigned significantly different credit lines):
This is a case of Apple Card accounts being individual and independently evaluated. It has nothing whatsoever to do with gender or martial status or whatever nefarious claptrap the Twitterati concoct in order to work themselves up into a spittle-spewing lather, as they are so wont to do while cloistered inside their twisted outrage machine.
https://twitter.com/gsbanksupport/status/1193703266003177472
https://twitter.com/gsbanksupport/status/1194022629419704320
I don’t think it’s Goldman. I think it’s the credit bureau which introduces gender bias. My wife and I use exactly the same accounts, but our credit scores are vastly different. I wonder if the credit bureaus treated authorized users the same as joint account holders, how much of the bias would be eliminated. Credit card issuers make it very easy to add an authorized user, but not all issuers even allow the option of being a joint account holder.