Technological Adoption and Gender Gaps in Financial Innovation: Evidence from Mobile Payments in Peru and Ecuador

Mobile payments in Latin America have grown rapidly, but gender gaps in their adoption persist and are not fully understood. This study examines how gender moderates the determinants of intention to accept mobile payments in Peru and Ecuador, using an expanded UTAUT model that adds perceived privacy, security, and technological competence, along with performance expectancy, effort expectancy, attitude, social influence, and facilitating conditions. We collected data through an online survey with purposive sampling, yielding 1122 valid responses (711 Ecuadorian and 411 Peruvian), and analyzed them using PLS-SEM and multigroup analysis. Seven of the nine hypothesized relationships were significant within both gender groups when estimated separately, while perceived privacy and effort expectancy were significant only among women. However, a formal permutation-based comparison of path coefficients between groups confirmed a statistically significant gender difference only for the effect of perceived security on performance expectancy (stronger among men), with a marginal trend for perceived privacy; the remaining observed differences in coefficient magnitude were not statistically significant between groups. The model explained a substantial proportion of the variance in intention to use for both men (R2 = 0.838) and women (R2 = 0.779), with a consistently higher R2 for men across all four endogenous variables. These results suggest that gender exerts a specific, empirically confirmed moderating effect on the role of trust-related beliefs in mobile payment adoption, alongside broader differences in the model’s overall explanatory power between men and women, with implications for gender-responsive financial inclusion policies in Latin America.