5 February 2013

Gender Neutral? Not in the accidents we have.

Research from Diamond confirms that, while women have more parking accidents, men have bigger accidents. They're also more likely to drown their car in floods.

Gender Neutral insurance pricing may be with us, but that doesn't stop there being differences between the way we crash. Female specialist insurer Diamond (yes they do now cover men for the same premiums) have analysed over 400,000 accident claims over the last 5 years and report significant differences in the accidents we have.

The research found that women are more likely to hit a parked car (so some truth in the stereotype there), have a collision in a car park or reverse into another vehicle. Men are more likely to hit an animal, crash barrier or tree. They are also more likely to hit a pedestrian on the pavement, have a head on collision and be involved in multi-vehicle accidents.

It wasn't just collisions that showed a difference, men were more likely to claim for flood damage and were more likely to have their car stolen.

David Halliday, Managing Director of Diamond said: "We were interested to investigate the types of accident claims made by men and women to see if there were any differences. It's clear that on the whole women are more likely to have low impact collisions at lower speeds in places such as car parks, whereas men are more likely to have more destructive accidents at higher speeds.

"Accidents caused by men are on average more costly than those caused by women. This was why in the past women paid lower insurance premiums than men. It's a month since the EU Gender Directive came in and our research clearly shows there are differences between men and women.”

Statistics from the Association of British Insurers back this up showing that men have a higher average claims cost per policy than women up until to their mid forties when it evens out. The difference is greatest among 17-18 year olds where the average cost of claims per policy were around £800 for women and over £1600 for men.

Insurers are still experimenting with different strategies to replace gender as an identifier of risk and yet maintain market share. Our car insurance comparison searches over 90 insurers and brokers for competitive car insurance quotes.