The Pros And Cons Of Unisex Equity

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Background
Under the new court decision made by the European Court of Justice on 1 March 2011, insurance companies in the European Union are no longer able to adopt any policies that involve gender discrimination. The banning of gender-based premium has serious impacts on insurers in sectors of life insurance, general insurance and various annuity products. The issue of whether a unisex pricing policy should be applied in Australian is of great concern to both policy holders and insurance companies. From my point of view, Australia should not follow EU’s lead of gender neutral pricing rule before the publication of any associated local legal acts. This essay will present reasonable discussions from both ethical and cultural prospective.
Unisex Pricing: Implications and Evaluation
Ethical Implications
Sexism, as defined to be the behavior that members of one sex being treated unfairly comparing to the other, is normally believed to be a moral wrong (refer 1 Mary B. Mahowald). Hence it could be argued that from an ethical perspective, differentiated premiums charged according to gender tend to be improper.
However, insurance companies calculate their amount of premiums and claims based on various risk factors among which gender is usually of the most importance. Similar to age and weight, gender is nothing more than a differentiation criterion used to evaluate the cost for providing insurance products and the likelihood of paying claims. It is generally acknowledged that there are significant biological differences between females and males in terms of risky behavior such as mortality rate, morbidity risk and likelihood of accidents. Removing the differentiation criterion of gender in Australia will pose great pressure on insuranc...

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...er’s portfolio.
Business Strategy
Since the distinctions of risk factors including life expectancy and accident rates between genders persist in one way or another, premiums could not be reflected appropriately by a single unisex price. While from a legal prospective, it is not guaranteed that gender-based pricing can be distinguished from gender discrimination. Hence we should bring up some business strategies to deal with future challenges caused by changes of legal rules.
Firstly, new prices should be applied only for those newly-entered policy holders in order to prevent the business from sudden adjustments.
Instead of using gender, the underlying biological differences of male and female should be classified into various risk factors. This may include testosterone in blood test

While personal risk of each single policy holder will be a better reflection than

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