Insurance premiums to change after ECJ gender ruling


Continue reading the main story Insurers cannot charge different premiums to men and women because of their gender, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.


I am all for rulings against sexual discrimination, (even if most of them are made by Women Judges )

But, for Insurance purposes, risk assessment is based on probability, determined by demographical statistics. If woman drive more carefully, it wil show up in the number of accidents , split that into age groups, again into location and again into model of car driven , and the tables get quite complicated, but remain accurate enough to create premiums for people in these risk groups.

Remove the ability to differentiate (discriminate ???) and that means all drivers are equal and will end up paying the same premium, possibly.

It works well I suppose for Basic Medical Insurance in Switzerland , but will it work for other insurances such as Car/Driver insurance ?

Gents first please.

Initially, perhaps ("innocent 'til proven guilty") - but one could reasonably expect the renewal premium of someone who subsequently makes a claim to be significantly higher than that of someone who doesn't ("guilty").

If the insurance companies are unhappy about the ruling, this is because it's going to cost them money - it's certainly not due to some late-breaking social altruism on their part.

i guess this means my premiums will be lower

i guess they can just charge women more. perfect money making opportunity.

It's also because it's incredibly stupid :

This is de-facto stupidity on a Dubya Bush scale - with equally damaging consequences for Europe.

I am totally into this! It always irked me to see that "diamond" advert - only for women because women are safer drivers. Funny thing about statistic is that you can slice a sample any way you like. Take all the population and slice off the people with blonde hair. They're either going to be safer drivers than the rest, or not-as-safe drivers as the rest (they're also either going to be more or less trustworthy, rich, intelligent etc). Put another way, how would it sound if there were a product that excluded, for example, black people or Jews? And if it could be statistically founded? Just proves how stupid statistics can be.

What wlll happen to Sheilas Wheels ???

It'll have to be Sheila's, Bruce's, and Suresh's wheels.

Thing is, insurances work by trying and testing individual's driving performance anyway - it's insane that people can get a priori reductions based on gender and I'm shocked that this was ever allowed.

Toilets next ?

No it proves that you don't understand the law of large numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

In probability theory, the law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value, and will tend to become closer as more trials are performed.

Separate but equal seems fair. It's OK to have women-only car insurance as long as they don't gain advantage from it. OK so put another way, it's like a prospective employer pointing to statistics saying that men typically earn more, advance further, are better educated, take less maternity leave/sick leave etc and so that employer has decided to employ men exclusively.

No it's nothing like that since the first employer to take on women , find that they do the same work - for less - since the above employers follow your logic driving down the cost of female labour - therefore exploiting the anomaly to maximise profit.

I should groan you for today's most ridiculous post (including the noise to signal thread) but I don't want to add to what is already a deluge. Please read my previous posts on this thread which basically amount to an admission of correlation but a distrust of causation in many statistics.

It's irrelevant, a priori discrimination is harmful to society whatever the outcome or rationale.

Yeah, but in CH, your health insurance premiums would go up...

And you miss the point. It has for a very long time been unlawful to discriminate based on gender. Insurance companies now have to wake up and catch up. Regardless of how you twist or view statistics. Nobody argues against the fact that women are generally better drivers in terms of having fewer accidents.

At first this seemed totally mad, but there may be some logic in it.

Determining an insurance policy on the basis of gender alone would certainly be discrimination. Whilst women may tend to drive less than men, have smaller cars and have more minor accidents, that is not true for all women. It is also true that all male drivers are not 'boy racers'.

I guess that what this ruling is trying to do is get the companies to determine the policy on factual risks rather than generalisations.

In future, other factors may have more bearing: Model/age of car; mileage; occupation/type of car use etc.

No mention of gender, but the comparative risks should be evident.

This should not make a major difference to overall policies.

A 30-year-old person employed as a secretary, driving 8000 miles a year to and from work in a 5-year-old Renault Clio should still be able to get a low premium.

A 24-year-old person in a new BMW driving 40,000 miles a year as a sales rep can still expect to pay a fortune.

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And those that are will get lower premiums anyway because of No Claims Bonuses.

No your previous posts point to a basic misunderstanding of sampling. Your ego seems to be preventing you seeing this.

...and the rub... If I have had an accident already, am I more likely to have another accident or not ? Assuming the average number of accidents peopel cause , is , say for arguments sake, 3 , and I have had 3 accidents , I am statistically likely not to have another accident and my premiums should go down. But they won't will they...