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Though gender discriminatory, but a good news for women. Women car drivers have been credited with lesser insurance premiums than their male counterparts for the same amount of the sum insured on their car. The reasons for lesser premium is that statistically women are safer drivers than men – both in terms of number of accidents and in terms of severity of accident. Researches have proved that that women drivers are more conscious while driving the car, they drive it slowly and safely as compared to their male counterparts.
Moreover men average more miles than women and hence are proportionately have higher involvement in accident at all ages. Insurance companies cite women's lower accident involvement in keeping the youth surcharge lower for young women drivers than for their male counterparts but adult rates are generally unisex.
Statistically it has been proved that Women are safer drivers, although they are not involved in lesser accidents but the severity of accidents and the damages caused by the accidents made by women are far less than men and hence insurance company offer lower premium to women drivers.
This differential might close in the near future for several reasons:
a) Several government agencies and political parties consider this as sheer gender discrimination and are raising their voice against it. European Commission had wanted to extend sex discrimination legislation to cover goods and services. The EC proposals could mean that gender could no longer be used as a basis for deciding the premium for insurance, pension and annuities. But the house of Lord committee rejected the bill citing that younger men had far worse accident and conviction records as compared to women.
b) With the changing lifestyle patterns women are constantly juggling time to maintain work life balance and in doing so they want to ruthlessly reduce travel time and hence incidents of road accidents by women are on rise. Hence in the coming times one can expect that differentials in the premium for car insurance based on sex might go. But till then women can drive their cars with the privilege of paying lesser premium for their car as a reward for safe driving.
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