Unisex Legislation
Categories: Regulations
Women and men may have different body parts...but unisex legislation says they shouldn’t have different insurance clauses.
Unisex legislation is legislation that is blind to gender when it comes to insurance policies. It gets a bit complicated with health insurance though; we don’t think many men have to worry about coverage for their non-existent ovaries, and women for their non-existent testes. And what about transgender people? Different states handle this differently, so...let’s go to some more straightforward examples.
A well-known form of insurance where men and women aren’t paying equal rates is car insurance. Young men pay more. Is that because insurance companies are being discriminatory based on gender and age? Well, no...insurance companies are just doing what they do: calculating risk. And based on their past insurance claims and risks, young men are a higher risk on the road than others. From a legal perspective, this rate is justified because it's based on risk from data, not discrimination based on gender.
Unisex legislation aims for insurance policies that don’t discriminate based on gender. If you can justify your actions by data, then it’s just economical, not discriminatory.
For instance, Montana's women noticed that they were paying higher insurance premium rates than men in the '80s...a higher premium that wasn't justified by data. Just pure sex-based discrimination. So they decided to do something about it. Montana led the way in unisex legislation, making sex discrimination illegal for all forms of insurance. So...you can imagine how teenage girls felt when their rates were raised. They had been paying less than teenage boys; boys were statistically riskier than girls and had been paying more. The data ruled the pricing.
