It's not often I come full circle on an issue in a single day, so I thought it worth mentioning. This morning, the European Court of Justice essentially banned gender-based pricing for things like insurance. Until now, insurance companies have long argued that since different groups of people - say, 'women' or 'TV show presenters' - represent different risk levels, they should pay different premiums. According to this judgment ((Disclaimer: I haven't read the judgement itself. I'm pretty sure no one else writing about it has either. We have lives, after all. I'm sure Jack of Kent - who also has a life, but spends much of it reading legal judgements - will have read it and will be able to write about more accurately tomorrow...)), this constitutes discrimination and is Bad.

My instant reaction was that this is pretty much absurd. I mean, yes, it is discrimination, but it's also just a simple matter of statistics. Insurance companies are not insane, they've done the numbers, they know that men represent a bigger cost centre than women, and the premiums merely reflect this. It's not bigotry, it's science. Bloody EU, coming over 'ere, eating our muffins, and all that.

Across today, though, I seem to have almost entirely changed my mind.

The first reason for this has also been explained by the Heresiarch in his usual thoughtful style. Just because, statistically speaking, women represent a lower cost centre overall than men, that doesn't mean any individual man deserves to be pre-emptively punished for the actions of other men. That's not to say he doesn't represent a greater risk - he absolutely does - but he also deserves to be considered based on his skills as a driver and the choices he makes, not based on the aggregate information about his gender.

In fact, the only way to accurately assess a driver is using their history - how many miles have they driven, over how long, and in that time how many accidents did they have (in which they were at fault) and how many claims did they make. Insurance companies already have a system for measuring this - the no-claims bonus - and it's really a far more useful method of assessing and rewarding good driving behaviour than blindly basing premiums on age and gender (though it does present some perverse incentives on insurance companies when assessing fault in accidents).

But the more I think about it the more I'm coming to think there's another problem with the justification for men's premiums being higher. We're happily believing the insurance company line that men's insurance premiums are higher because they represent a higher cost centre for car insurance providers - but that's not the only possible explanation. Car insurance is a peculiar market, because the choice is either buy insurance, or don't drive a car. If driving were generally less important to women than it is to men, and I'm willing to believe this to be the case, then a clever insurance company could use this fact to their advantage and charge men more than women for the simple reason that men are more willing to pay. That would be pretty standard price-targeting - the same reason walk-on train fares are higher than advance tickets, for instance, or that students get a discount on virtually everything. Of course, price-targeting tends to be fairly unpopular amongst the buying public, so that clever insurance company might want to consider backing up their pricing strategy with some kind of semi-rational logic to do with aggregate costs of insuring various groups.

Of course, I'm not saying that this is what is happening - merely that it is just as plausible an explanation for the disparity between men and women's insurance premiums as 'women are lower risk than men'. And price-targeting based on gender for most things in life would be not be considered acceptable by the masses (not that it doesn't happen, of course, as the price of women's clothing will readily attest), so why should it be in car insurance?

So do I still think the ECJ's judgment was absurd? You know, I'm not really sure any more.