Female and looking for cheap car insurance?
Can women still get the cheapest car insurance? Yes they certainly can. If you're a lady looking for the lowest possible premiums you can almost certainly get a better deal than a male can.
How a woman can legally be offered cheaper premiums
Is this not illegal? Insurers cannot taken applicant's sex into account when working out a premium., since the EU's gender directive outlawed this in 2012, despite the much higher claims record of male motorists. They can however reduce prices for the sort of cars that a woman is more likely to drive, and for the sort of jobs that women are more likely to have. This means that if you are a teacher, or a dental nurse; work in human resources, a nursery or a care home; you are much more likely to get the lowest possible premiums than if you are an engineer, a builder or an oil rig worker, all industries that are traditionally male dominated.
The myth of increased prices for women
These lower rates only apply up to about the age of 40. Above that age premiums for both sexes tend to get closer together. However this is what happened before the gender equality laws came out! Prior to that, females under the age of 40 were statistically far less likely to have accidents than their testosterone fuelled male counterparts, but over the age of 40 the statistics levelled out. There is a myth that women used to have better and cheaper policies than men regardless of their ages, but the truth is that it only applied to younger ones.
Mature women can get better prices than before the gender directive
Women have actually benefited from this new method of working out premiums! Over the age of 60 they were actually discriminated against by many insurers. The theory was that at that age they would have husbands that were in poorer health than they were, which would mean that they would have to do more driving them beforehand. Sometimes insurers use some very strange logic. However the fact was that once a lady had reached middle age she used to have to pay more, on average, than an equivalent male. That is now illegal!
Female only insurance companies
There is another way in which insurance companies can, quite legally, offer lower premiums to females. They just set up companies with female sounding names but charge lower than average premiums to their younger clients. How many men are going to admit to having bought a car insurance policy from an insurer which obviously caters for women motorists? A company, for instance, that advertises that amongst their benefits is special cover for child seats or handbags?
You still need to compare quotes
Does this mean, then, that you should just get quotes from insurers that specialise in insuring females? Not necessarily. The fact is that there are far more issues that are taken into consideration when working out a premium than the sex of the applicant. Very important ones are the applicant's postcode, driving experience, and choice of car. Different companies weigh these up in different ways and this usually depends on their own statistical calculations. How they view, for instance, the difference between a driver who lives in a city and one who lives in a country town, or one that drives a saloon car or another that owns a cabriolet, can vary enormously from one company to another. This means that just because you are a woman doesn't necessarily mean that an insurance company that specialises in insuring women will offer you the lowest quote. This is why you can usually get a better deal by comparing prices through a good price comparison site.
Women deserve cheaper insurance anyway!
Women tend, on average, to pick up fewer motoring convictions than men, have fewer accidents than men (and at lower speeds; hence less damage or injury risks) than men, and they also tend to be more faithful to their insurance companies, renewing their policies automatically, year after year. On the whole they are much better potential customers, but the last point means that many female motorists still end up paying far more than they should for their cover, because they simply don't shop around enough. At a time when many insurers sneakily push-up premiums at every renewal, it is a pity that far too many ladies don't look around for better prices as much as they should; it could save them a great deal of money!