

Car insurance: why women face £300 rise in premiums - 1337biz
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/oct/05/car-insurance-women-rise-premiums-eu-ruling

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tomwalker
It is about time that this sexual discrimination is ended

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csense
This ruling is insane.

As a male, it's actually against my self-interest to defend higher premiums
for men, but here goes:

It's an empirically observable fact that men are riskier than women.
Deliberately refusing to use that knowledge distorts the free market and leads
to a misallocation of resources.

Say that there's a young married couple who can only afford to insure one
spouse as a driver. Say that both spouses work, and it would be equally
(in)convenient for the husband or the wife to be chosen as the driver. With
equal premiums, they could flip a coin to decide who will drive; they're
indifferent. But with unequal premiums, they will always choose to let the
wife be the driver, since that's the cheaper option and they're perfectly
indifferent between the alternatives otherwise.

The latter situation is better for society because it reduces the expected
monetary damage of accidents, since it's an empirically observable fact that
this is lower for women. This fact would be reflected in free-market prices,
except now the insurance market is distorted in the name of gender equality.

 _It's okay to discriminate based on observable facts._ Women's restrooms
don't have urinals. This isn't because of some grand patriarchal conspiracy to
make women use a sitting position to represent their subordination; rather,
this furnishing decision is due to observable differences in male and female
bodies' biological plumbing.

If some court decided to force women's restrooms to have urinals to make them
"equal" to men's restrooms, it would simply lead to a waste of limited and
valuable time, money, and indoor space to build fixtures that would never be
used.

EDIT: Just read the end of the article, about life insurance. Under the new
ruling, every married couple contributing equally to two life insurances
should just stop putting money on the wife and instead double their bet on the
husband dying. Life insurance will actually become more valuable -- maybe even
a positive expected value bet -- for men or couples that can do this, with
their profits being sucked out of single, divorced or widowed women's
premiums. This effect might even be large enough to destroy the women's life
insurance market altogether; unless she knows she's near death, it might
become a better bet for a woman to just put her money in savings bonds, index
funds, or cash under her mattress. (I.e., while a court can force women's
premiums to increase to make them equal to mens', and an insurance company now
can't legally "know" a customer's gender when it sets the premium/payout bet
structure, a woman _does_ know her own gender and _can_ refuse to buy life
insurance on that basis since her personal EV is now negative.) Whether this
is a desirable result for a strong believer in gender equality is left as an
exercise to the reader.

