For years it has been a fairly widespread belief that men pay more for their car insurance than women. As it turns out, this is true up to a point. However, recent studies found that the opposite is true for adults ages 25 and up.
That’s right, women over the age of 25 tend to pay more for car insurance than their male counterparts. According to the Insurance Journal, studies in 2017 and 2018 found that women over 25, specifically women between the ages of 40 and 60, tend to pay more for their car insurance policies than men of the same age.
Why Do Women Pay More For Car Insurance?
In the past, insurers claimed that gender was a consideration when deciding policies, but a minor one. Insurers would hide behind data, claiming that young men are statistically more prone to risks. Therefore, it made sense to charge them more for car insurance. The public has not been buying the line for years, and now many people are pushing for insurers to stop considering gender in any way when determining the cost of insurance policies. California made headlines for being the first state to legislate this mentality in decades.
Is It Legal To Charge Women More For Car Insurance?
In the 70s and 80s, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania passed laws in the wake of the women’s rights movement that made it illegal for insurers to consider gender when determining policy pricing. In 2018, California passed a similar piece of legislation.
Former California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones spoke with the Insurance Journal about why he felt it was important for the state to pass those laws. “An internal analysis by the department concluded auto insurers in California were all over the map with regard to how they handled gender as a rating factor,” Jones said. “In some cases, women were paying more and some less than similarly situated men. There was no consistency.”.
Many insurers insist that gender is still a reasonable factor when determining policy rates. The public perception seems to disagree with that mentality. It is not unreasonable to assume that more states will follow in California’s footsteps in the near future.