If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Read the community guidelines before posting ✨
Options
Essential support for under 25s
Essential support for under 25s
Take a look around and enjoy reading the discussions. If you'd like to join in, it's really easy to register and then you'll be able to post. If you'd like to learn what this place is all about, head here.
Comments
And I tell you that if insurance firms could not discriminate then they will make losses and go out of business or everyone will pay more.
Which do you prefer? That everypone pay the same for some petty sense of 'justice'?
And of course I am sure you are aware that 'personal experience' is completely irrelevant to the argument, as it is to most......
I have supported my position - it doesn't need more than a one liner. Having children is a right, is neccesary for society, it is necessary for society that parents look after children, more neccessary than the right of a company to make a profit. I guess it comes down to what you prioritise - people or profit.
For some people, having a car is a personal necessity (work, relationships, lifestyle etc - which all have knock-on effects to all aspects of life). If you accept discrimination against social/gender groups on that, then it would stand to reason you would accept discrimination on other grounds as well (race etc).
If a gender or social group is discriminated against, it stands to reason that all other social groups can be discriminated against equally. But this isn't so -it's an illogical double standard.
Having a car is comparable to having a child? Errr...no.
Who is accepting discrimination?
Look, this is a non-argument. You might as well argue that insurance companies discriminate on age (younger drivers have higher premiums) or postcode or size of car or whether people have alarms etc.
No. But it can still be a critical necessity as I said for some people.
Well, you're opposing the right of an employer to take a women's age and status into consideration yet don't have a problem with insurance companies milking more money from young males by means of gender discrimination. You can say one is more important than the other, but it's hard to deny the evident contradiction. Permitting statistical discrimination wholesale or prohibiting it wholesale would be a far more sensible and even approach.
You could do, but I don't really care either way. All i'm saying is there's a double standard with slightly dubious foundations.
What about age discrimination, sexuality? Neither of those relate to human necessity... is it okay to discriminate on those grounds?
I'm 22 and male.
I couldn't pay much more anyway.
Why should I care?
Got it in one.
Oh Christ. :rolleyes: Its not discrimination OK?
Well how big of you to admit that you are a petty person, well done to you ........... :rolleyes:
It's not pettiness though, is it?
Why should I have to pay £400 more than my wife for my car insurance simply because she is a woman? We're equally good drivers, both with clean licenses and no crashes, why should I pay more?
If questioning why I should pay more makes me petty, then an awful lot of people are petty.
Think its already been covered that this statement isn't correct.
How so? Insurance costs based on your age, gender, employment - but not on the individual asking for cover. How is that not discrimination?
This is a corker worthy of it's own thread i think!
My two cents:
I don't think there's any doubt that insurance companies discriminate. I'm certainly penalised as a 23 year old male driver (with no claims to my name) because of the track record of my demographic. Whether the discrimination involved is comparable to that received by women in the work place is a toughie!
I think my place of work poses a good, but perhaps atypical, scenario for analysis. I work for a company that it made up of 6 people (including myself). It lives very much hand to mouth and the work load increases quite significantly for everyone else when a member of staff takes holiday or time off through illness. Would it be unreasonable for the owners of my company to seriously consider not hiring a woman in her late twenties / early thirties woman because they simply couldn't afford to pay her maternity leave and have her work load distributed between the remaining staff members (or hire another member of staff to cover in her absence)?
Thought I was going mad...
It isn't, not directly. The principle is the same, which was my point.
Exactly. Why should the business suffer for what is effectively a lifestyle choice? And as they would, if that choice is taken up, why shouldn't they be allowed to take it into consideration?
As a side point, isn't illegeal for an employer to ask in an interview if the woman has any plans for children? Now normally my first reaction would be "What does that matter? The chances are she will.", but knowing my employers situation it would seem like a perfectly reasonable question to ask as long as they explained their reasons behind it.
Not so much illegal in a criminal sense, but certainly in a civil sense.
It's why I ask the question in the first place.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that its only illegal if you ask it to women and then factor in that she'll be off work as a reason for not giving her the job as that's sexual discrimination. Its OK if you also ask men the same question and then don't use the answers you got when deciding who to give the job to. Which off course means it makes no sense to ask the question anyway...
That said this information is based on a semi-drunken pub conversation and I can't vouch for its accuracy.
The problem of adverse selection explains some of these government requirements. With adverse selection, people with high risk (unobserved by the insurance firms) tend to buy insurance; but this tends to drive up insurance rates so that people with lower risks do not buy. In extreme cases of adverse selection, no insurance will be provided. Requiring that everyone buy eliminates the adverse selection problem. "
(John Taylor, Stanford University)
Of course it is.
You have nothing to back up this "non-argument" position, of course. Other than the "human necessity" approach, which doesn't actually mean jack.
Blaggy?