Employing a novel dataset of Indian cooperative banks during 2004-2013, we exploit the natural experiment of the financial crisis to examine the lending behaviour of women-owned cooperatives. The findings indicate that these banks increased lending to both agriculture and small-scale industries, especially in high-income states. Further disaggregation reveals that the possible weaknesses in asset quality from lending to these sectors in low-income states could be driving the results. Robustness tests support these findings.