That's not exactly the way credit works. For one, you're supposed to report your income not joint income when filling out applications. You can however list joi

That's not exactly the way credit works. For one, you're supposed to report your income not joint income when filling out applications. You can however list joint assets, or at least that's much fuzzier. EDIT: Apparently, you can use household income. However, if two parties are applying for a credit card and trying to secure both lines with the same assets, you should expect one to be lower (if not outright declined). In this case, there's a FICO score to consider, but there's also other components. For instance, you can be declined from receiving a credit card if you are a "churner", you can also be declined for not making the bank enough money (aka you never miss payments and the card has no fees). Finally and importantly, the bank has the right to set what ever bar it wants for your credit limit. If they feel giving you a high limit will make them money, they do it, if they don't, they wont ("they" here being encoded in an algorithm). They can even legally assign credit at random, provided they have controls to ensure the bank doesn't go bankrupt. In this case, the only thing the bank has to prove is that they didn't use signals illegally (usually this includes adding protected class information, e.g. gender, among others). Many banks don't even keep a record of that information and definitely not as part of the algorithm. I suspect Goldman wouldn't be that stupid. Meaning - what ever the reason for the discrepancy, gender was very very likely not the culprit here.