A women owned bank is a federally regulated depository institution where women hold at least 51 percent of voting stock or make up a majority of the board while serving a community the regulator considers predominantly made up of that group. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency currently counts just 16 such banks nationwide, a number that says a lot about how far women have had to go to gain a foothold in banking.
Why the Federal Reserve Widened Its Definition
On March 5, 2021, the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors voted to expand its definition of minority depository institutions, or MDIs, to include banks owned by women. It was a formal acknowledgment of something advocates had argued for years: women, despite making up close to half the global population and well over half the U.S. population, remain scarce as bank owners and executives. The World Bank pegged women at roughly 49.7 percent of the world's population in 2022, while U.S. Census data put the domestic figure at 58.5 percent that same year. Women's labor force participation in the U.S. stood at 62.5 percent in January 2024. None of that translates into proportional ownership of financial institutions.
The FDIC defines an MDI as an insured depository institution where minority individuals own 51 percent or more of the voting stock, or where a majority of the board is minority and the institution primarily serves a minority community. Ownership has to rest with U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents for it to count. Under that standard, and using the OCC's roster of nationally regulated banks, there are 16 women owned banks operating today. That list undercounts the true total, since the FDIC's own MDI roster also includes institutions supervised directly by the Fed or the FDIC itself, and the Federal Reserve has said it will add women owned institutions to its own published list as they are identified. There is also no comprehensive national registry of women owned credit unions, though a 2021 brief from the Credit Union National Association found that 51 percent of credit union CEOs are women, a leadership statistic that does not by itself make an institution women owned.
How Women Broke Into Bank Ownership
Banking in America dates back to the Bank of North America in 1781, but nearly a century passed before a woman ran one. Deborah Powers changed that in 1877 when she founded D. Powers and Sons in Troy, New York, alongside her two sons. She was 87 at the time, making her both the oldest and the first known woman to found a bank in U.S. history, and the only woman bank president born in the 1700s. She wasn't, however, the first woman to lead one. That distinction belongs to Louise M. Weiser, who took over Winneshiek County Bank in Decorah, Iowa, in 1875 after her husband, the bank's founder, died. She ran it until her son succeeded her in 1892. Leila Comstock, who started as an assistant cashier and bookkeeper at 16, became the youngest woman bank president when she took charge of Comstock Banking Company's original Green City, Missouri, location in 1892 while also serving as cashier of its new branch.
The most consequential figure from this era is Maggie L. Walker, an African American businesswoman and daughter of a formerly enslaved mother. Walker founded and led St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia, in 1903, running it until her death in 1934. She built a thriving bank in the former Confederate capital during the height of Jim Crow, while also founding a newspaper that became a platform for civil rights advocacy. Other early trailblazers include Evelyn Tome, who in 1898 became the first woman to lead two banks at once in Maryland; Mary E. Miller, who founded Lafayette Bank and Trust Company in the Colorado town she also established in 1900; and Anna Martin, a German immigrant who founded Commercial Bank of Mason in Texas in 1901, the first foreign born woman to serve as a U.S. bank president.
Legal Barriers That Slowed Women's Progress
Progress in bank leadership didn't translate into broader financial rights for ordinary women. Married Women's Property Acts, passed piecemeal across states between 1839 and 1895, were needed just to stop wives from automatically losing control of their own property to their husbands. Even that reform took generations to fully take hold. It wasn't until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974 that married women could get a credit card in their own name, separate from their husbands, regardless of income or prior credit history.
The 19th Amendment's ratification in 1920 opened doors elsewhere. A year later, Bank of Italy, the institution that eventually became Bank of America, launched the Women's Banking Department, the first U.S. depository operation designed for, staffed by, and directed entirely by women, even though the bank itself wasn't women owned. It let women manage their own accounts without a husband's involvement for the first time. The department expanded to two more offices between 1921 and 1923, and by four years after its founding had more than 20,000 account holders.
Working women outside wealthy households had always held jobs, and their numbers grew through the 20th century. During the Great Depression, when men lost work en masse, jobs for women actually increased, though pay stayed dismal: in 1940, women earned 62 cents for every dollar men made. World War II pulled even more women into paid work after December 1941, filling roles left vacant by men headed overseas, only for many of those jobs to disappear once soldiers returned home.
The 1960s brought a shift in strategy. Civil rights leaders and community organizers concluded that economic independence required actual ownership of banking institutions, not just access to them. That thinking, paired with the momentum of second wave feminism (a movement closely intertwined with civil rights activism), fed into a 20 year surge in minority and women owned banks. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned employment discrimination based on sex among other protected categories, gave that push legal backing.
Why So Few of These Banks Survived
Despite the achievements of Powers and Walker, women owned banks struggled to multiply, and being women owned wasn't always treated as an asset. First Women's Bank opened in New York City in 1975, right as second wave feminism peaked. Fourteen years later it rebranded as First New York Bank for Business. Martin A. Simon, appointed chair after investors bought the bank in 1986, explained the change as a move into middle market commercial lending, driven partly by a belief that a bank serving women exclusively no longer made sense. The rebrand didn't fix the bank's finances; regulators shut it down permanently in 1992.
Pinning down what actually counts as a women owned bank remains messy. Unlike most other MDI categories, where ownership by a specific group often exists from a bank's founding, women frequently gain ownership through inheritance of banks originally built by male relatives. The FDIC's definition also gets fuzzy in practice: it's straightforward to check whether women hold 51 percent of voting stock, but far murkier to define what counts as a
