Gendered Outcomes in Student Loan Bankruptcy

Women are winning more student loan bankruptcy cases than men, a notable reversal that challenges what we know about gender and legal outcomes. Drawing on hand-coded data from over 1,300 adversary proceedings spanning 2007 to 2023, this Article documents a sharp post-2022 shift. Women now succeed in 89% of cases compared to 82% for men. The puzzle is that financial metrics cannot explain this gap.

Men and women who file these cases look indistinguishable on paper: similar debt loads, comparable assets, and equivalent incomes. Legal representation explains part of the story. Women are slightly more likely to hire attorneys, and lawyers improve outcomes. But even among those debtors representing themselves, women prevail more frequently.

Caregiving responsibilities, though more common among women, also fail to explain the disparity. The Article situates these findings in adjacent literatures on credit-as-social-provision and economic abuse, arguing that the attestation process translates certain structural disadvantages that are more commonly borne by women into persuasive, documentable claims of “undue hardship.”