The insurance ruling is not perfect, but at least no one will have to pay more simply because they happen to be a man or a woman
Compiling data to establish, for example, that black people had fewer car crashes or the Chinese more would seem a rather suspect use of time. Using such information to set race-specific prices would cause outrage. But sex discrimination is different, as deep traditions expect us to look out for, and even celebrate, gender differences. After the European court of justice ruled against separate insurance premiums for men and women yesterday, few voices were heard hailing a social advance. Instead pundits, even those ordinarily of a liberal bent, queued up to denounce the "breathtaking stupidity" of the judges for ignoring the indisputable facts about boy racers.
It was certainly a bad day for Sheilas' Wheels, but not for women in general. Extra motoring costs will be offset by gains in retirement. Starker than the pay gap, the pension gulf has been widened by sex-specific annuities that require retiring women to stump up more to get the same income, on the basis that old ladies generally soldier on for longer. The savings of the unfairer sex will be footed by retiring men, but then they will be quids-in on their cars. Levelling the position inevitably creates winners and losers in different scenarios, which sometimes cancel out. But even where they do not, this redistribution is not in itself a reason to continue with discrimination.
The insurance industry bleated about the burden of recalculating premiums, and collating extra information about customers in order to gauge their risk without relying on sex. But if such transition costs were an insurmountable obstacle, nothing would ever advance. The serious problem would arise only if insurers were always saddled with a flat-rate premium, which took no account of the chance of a payout. In that scenario, safe punters who did not expect to claim might decide to go without cover. The loss of the cheap-to-insure cases from the market would set in train a spiral of rising costs which could eventually make premiums so pricey that those in greatest need of cover would be unable to afford it.
This danger is all-important in theory, but not in the practice of the particular insurance markets in question. Car insurance is compulsory, so lower-risk women cannot simply decide to go without, unless they give up on driving completely. Likewise, the purchase of a pension is hardly an optional extra. More fundamentally, there are myriad factors other than gender which have much more of a bearing on risk. Some will correlate with it, but at least no one will any longer have to pay more simply because they happen to be a man or a woman. Such crude discrimination is just not needed, since there is more to life than sex.
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