Life Insurance Search

After being moved to do so by the EU’s Gender Directive, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) has published information that enables insurance companies to continue to use gender as a component in the pricing of policies. This will include policies right across the spectrum of life insurance, such as those for critical illness cover, level term life insurance and decreasing term life insurance.

Implementation of the EU Gender Directive into UK law means that insurers can now only use gender as a discriminatory factor for the pricing of policies if they can publish supporting data.

So that is exactly what the ABI has done, publishing data that shows significant differences between the claiming patterns of men and women for all kinds of life insurance policies, including critical illness cover. They also published data detailing gender differences in claiming patterns on other kinds of policy, such as for car insurance and medical insurance.

A spokesperson for the ABI commented, “The insurance industry is against unfair discrimination of any kind and does not practice it. But it is legitimate for companies to set prices, levels of cover and benefits according to a number of factors which together determine the relative risk that any given customer poses.

“The gender directive and the UK’s transposition of it recognised this and charged the insurance industry with compiling and publishing data to show the relevance of gender in making underwriting decisions. This has now been done. As a result, customers will continue to be able to benefit from fair pricing and a range of products which suit their needs at affordable prices.”

Generally speaking, in the UK at the moment, women will pay less for life insurance than men. With critical illness cover, however, the gender gap is less clear-cut, as a woman is only likely to pay significantly less than a man if she excludes breast cancer cover from her policy.