If you can explain why it is OK for car insurance to charge differently by gender, but by race is not OK, I will be impressed.
Racial discrimination requires "strict scrutiny" to be legal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
Sex discrimination requires "intermediate scrutiny" to be legal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_scrutiny
This podcast gives a wonderful history:
All that remains to do in the US is find the political will to outlaw discrimination that favors women.
edit And then I get downvoted for sticking my neck out. Let me break the parent post down.
It asserts that charging genders equally will shift more burden to women. This is clearly true because premiums are higher for men because we have more accidents (so much for all the female driver jokes).
It also asserts women were a previously disadvantaged class. Also clearly true.
So to the downvoters out there, you might have found something disagreeable about the parent post, but you're wrong and he's right.
> fair share
Male drivers and female drivers don't have a "fair share" of insurance costs. No one should be obligated to pay for the actions of others simply because they're the same sex.
Driving risk should be evaluated on an individual basis based on those individuals' behavior.
> putting them at even more of a disadvantage
Young women are no longer at a disadvantage. Young women graduate college more often and earn more than young men.
I focus on young women and young men in this case because those are the people most affected by gender discrimination in auto insurance pricing, because they lack individual driving records on which to base insurance rates.
Women graduate from college more often, but college is not what it once was - I'm a college dropout and I'm sure I earn more than most graduates (plus I don't have the debt.) Women still earn less than men. Your claim that they earn more is just false.
But maybe if you look beneath the surface you will find out that minorities are more likely to drive older, less safe cars, which leads to them having more accidents - they don't have more accidents because they are black, they have more accidents because of other factors.
The same with men and women - I think it's fair to say that men drive more powerful, larger cars(on average) than women do. So....they get into more accidents because the cars they drive are objectively more difficult to drive. Which obviously means that you should calculate your premium based on the type of vehicle being insured, not on the gender of the driver - and, by extension, insurance for a man and a woman, on the same vehicle, should be identical. Penalizing a man in this situation because men as a group get into more accidents is absolutely unfair.
I know you're sorta spitballing here, but at least in my experience that's a bit backwards. Around here, I'd guess women drive SUVs more than men do. Growing up, fathers would buy their daughters SUVs because they were safer. Now, husbands have their wives drive the family SUV for the same reason. Plus, moms and minivans, etc. That might just be a thing in the area I grew up, though. It's probably different in downtown Seattle.
> So....they get into more accidents because the cars they drive are objectively more difficult to drive.
I'd bet the testosterone doesn't help much, either :-)
I'd love to see actual data on this , especially power and size of cars grouped by gender.
>>I'd bet the testosterone doesn't help much, either :-)
Women have their own behaviour-affecting hormones too, you know.
Where in the UK are you? I lived several years in England as a teenager and went to a 'nice' school in the suburbs of Surrey and almost everybody drove their kids to school.
Also in the UK and can report that mothers driving “Chelsea tractors” is totally a thing.
> Women have their own behaviour-affecting hormones too, you know.
Of course. I was making a half-joke.
Whoa there. Someone might infer from this that you believe men might generally make decisions / respond to situations differently than women with biological reasons being a contributing factor. That's a dangerous line of thought.
Oh, come on, do you really think insurance companies don't break out all the different factors? They're in a cutthroat business where every tiny margin they make over their competitors is a big advantage. But if they guess wrong, they'll cut premiums too aggressively and lose money on accident claims.
Car size and gender are both factors. It's possible they're partly correlated, but actuaries can still incorporate both factors into their models.
Charging higher premiums for men is fair if you only care about accident rates. If you feel it's a form of discrimination and want to level the playing field, that has to be done via government regulation.
The simplest "AI" (linear regression) will already factor this out if it has the data about the car driven and gender. Any remaining gender imbalance is attributable either to another factor or it is actually gender related (e.g. increased road rage, high speed driving and risky following behavior due to testosterone might be a stronger accident predictor than too careful driving (not speed matching fast enough when merging on the highway), too slow driving or worse spatial reasoning which are usually correlated with higher estrogen levels.)
In general the AI will just become a better predictor the more data it has available and the more detailed the data is. But an effeminate man or a manly woman might behave more than the opposite gender and thus be treated wrongly. We could probably solve this by tacking on a recent endocrinological report to every application, but this gets quite privacy invasive at some point.
In general if you get insurance you want to be part of a larger risk group to mitigate your effects. Having no insurance just means you have the most fair risk group, which is just yourself.
Because actuarial tables say so. Insurance companies that decided it did not matter folded or changed their opinion after the losses
Race is the other way around.
Insurance companies have a strong incentive to price policies accurately, so you have to assume that discriminatory decisions are made with that goal in mind. Any restriction on factors that make the model less accurate (like forbidding race) will lead to higher volatility and a lower stock price (insurance companies are prized in portfolio management for their low volatility).
The government, however, recognizes that most people are forced to buy car insurance, which means that they are being forced to pay for those profit-maximizing decisions. And to the extent that being forced to pay can creates a downward spiral of high costs leading to poor decision making and even higher costs, that is something to be prevented.
So where to draw the line? Well, the people most at risk of getting into a downward spiral are the already economically disadvantaged (read:poor). The government already prevents considering whether the insured is poor (either explicitly or implicitly by not allowing questions about income/net worth on applications).
But really, any factor which would tend to disproportionately target the already-poor would need to be limited as well, since that can often become an end-run around the limitation. If you consider the factors that would do that at the population level, race would be very strong indicator of income, but gender would not be. (yes, I know women make less in the same jobs, but we're talking about the macro here, including women who are heads of household, 2-income families, and stay-at-home moms).
Now, it doesn't explain why other factors that would seem to be associated with low income like zipcode are allowed. But to answer your question about why gender is ok to price discriminate against while race is not, I think the answer is we try not to force poor people to pay more for government-mandated things just because they are poor or otherwise exhibit a feature that would characterize them that way to an uninformed observer.
While some studies show that it is true that Mexicans/African-Americans/insert-other-group-here are a higher insurance risk due to crime and to a smaller extent due to accidents, this is not because of their ethnic background but because of other perhaps correlated but not causally linked factors - they are more likely to live in poor areas with higher crime rates and not be able to afford better security measures. Being Mexican/black/other is not a causal factor despite there being some correlation, so it is not fair to discriminate based on that property, any discrimination should be based upon the causal factors, rather than the lazy correlation, to avoid being unfair to those said factors do not apply to.
(FYI: male here, with many an anecdotal tale to support us being worse drivers generally, if only by a little bit)
lt;cbatr: correlation does not imply causation. It is not fair to discriminate based on factors that are merely correlated with the risk, but it is fair to discriminate based on factors that can be shown to be causally related to the insurance risk.
Of course in the UK (and the EU more generally?) it has gone the other way: insurance companies were forced to stop discriminating by gender which means they can no longer give women lower premiums. Did they lower male premiums at the same time to make up the difference, or just bump female premiums up and pocket the extra? Go on, guess...
Are you suggesting that their "inherent racism" is causing them to forgo shareholder profits?
Using discriminating factors that are simply correlated rather than causal is unfair as it penalises some people within a given profiled group for no good reason. This may not be due to inherent racism, but merely due to not properly understanding the statistics. Or not due to inherent racism now but because of lazy "it has always been done this way" reasoning. It may in part be due to racism, of course, as people are less likely to question results that agree with their worldview.
Identifying the correct causal factors and using the as discriminators is fair, and can be demonstrated to be better for the business too by allowing lower prices for some groups aiding competitiveness, but it can be harder work leading to the less effective and less fair option being used - saving effort now at the expense of being fair (and some potential longer-term business benefits).
A similar norm I often see from caregivers is that they consider boys to be "rough and tumble" and girls "soft and dainty". It is easy to see how those behaviour classes could extend to insurance risk.
Is being a woman/man really the causation? Or is it something like the environment that the genders are brought up in? If it is the latter, how is that any different than a minority being brought up in a poor neighbourhood (and, statistically, stay there)? After all, in both cases, you are penalizing those who had an upbringing that is outside of the statistical norm due to a presence of correlation.
With a lot of states changing the requirements for drivers permits to require more training and disallowing multiple occupants under certain conditions when the driver is newly licensed it will be interesting to see if this changes.
Why should an actuary care about cause? The correlation is what matters for that purpose.
Edit: guys, you should probably consult a lawyer. If you don't refuse to disclose but lie instead, that's called deception and at least in the EU it's a criminal offense. Also, morality, huh?
Why “should” it? Don’t hold your breath.
Why wouldn't the same be true of differential treatment to the detriment of men?
Do you? Because you're going to actually have to make this argument for me - I don't think I've ever seen feminists say that capital accumulation mechanics are the cause of misogyny.
In this case auto insurance rates are both a consequence of the stereotype and a mechanism that imposes it on new drivers.
The argument for restricting discrimination on a gendered basis relies on the socially instructive nature of vehicular insurance to teenagers.
That feels exceptionally weak.