Isn't this legal? Car insurance companies can give you a different premium based on your age and gender, right? If it's afinancial transaction and it's a risk-reward assessment, can't they get away with this nonsense if they have some data to back it up?
GS is saying that they weren't taking gender into account. The people described in the article seem like the wives of high-earning men, which may mean that, even in the case of married couples with totally commingled finances/joint accounts, they're looking to individual incomes, and the women have much lower individual incomes than their husbands. It's probably not right to do so for couples with truly commingled finances, but it's not discriminatory. The article does mention women who out-earn their husbands also talking about receiving lower credit limits but doesn't provide any specific examples (the two specific examples are both of the wives-of-high-earning-men variety), so it's hard to say if those cases didn't have some other factor. I wouldn't be shocked by discrimination here, but the article doesn't provide a smoking gun and does have a totally plausible alternate explanation.
More importantly, though, I don't think this would be seen as justifiable if they really were looking at gender, even based on some wonky metric the credit card company can pull out suggests maybe women are slightly more likely to default on credit card payments. Under federal law, yeah, they'd probably get away with it, but state law in New York (and California and some other states, but New York is operative here) would wallop them.
