The Bank of Russia will return to the issue of factors that should not be taken into account when determining the price of the CMTPL policy, said the head of the Bank of Russia Elvira Nabiullina during a press conference. “As for insurance tariffs and criteria for which differentiation cannot be introduced, we will return to this issue, including gender, and discuss it again,” the head of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation answered, answering a question from Interfax.

Since August 24, insurers have acquired the right to take into account the individual characteristics of car owners when forming the price of the policy in the compulsory “car insurance”. At the same time, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation prudently created a list of factors, the use of which is unacceptable. Among them: nationality, linguistic and racial affiliation, membership in political parties and public associations, as well as official position, religion and attitude to religion. The gender factor was not included in this list.

Meanwhile, Russian insurance companies began to take into account the gender of the car owner when determining the price of the OSAGO policy.

In particular, gender has already been declared among the factors taken into account in Ingosstrakh, AlfaStrakhovanie and RESO-Garantia, which are among the top 5 insurers in terms of compulsory motor third party liability insurance. On their official websites, companies indicate only a list of factors that will affect the price of the policy, without explaining exactly how and how much.

“I believe that the Bank of Russia did the right thing, because our proposals were precisely that at the launch stage a minimum limited set of prohibiting factors is needed,” Yevgeny Ufimtsev, executive director of the Russian Union of Auto Insurers, told reporters. At the same time, according to Ufimtsev, no one had “a desire to infringe on women, men, car manufacturers, there was a clear systematic statistical work.”

“If some categories of drivers get into accidents more often, then there is a multiplying factor for them, if less often – then a lowering factor. I give a 99% guarantee that a woman with children will definitely receive a reduction in tariff. Mom is a more responsible driver”, – explained Ufimtsev.

As follows from the statistics of the IC “Consent” for 2019, women become participants in road accidents 5-10% more often than men (depending on the category of the car and experience). However, the average loss for men is slightly higher than for women – by 2-3%.

“Gender is one of the most insignificant factors, that is, we can say that it has practically no effect on the tariff. If we compare the prices of policies, for example, for hull insurance for men and women, then it is necessary to compare the cost for people of the same age. Then it turns out that policies for women may be cheaper, “Andrei Kovalev, director of the underwriting and product management department at Soglasia, told Interfax.

Ingosstrakh IC told the agency that “gender is just one of 20 factors in the tariffication of OSAGO.” “The new tariff system is set up in such a way that a client who often gets into accidents will receive a premium, clients who have good statistics should receive a reduced cost of the policy,” Nikolay Gorbachev, chief actuary of Ingosstrakh Insurance Company, explained.

It should be noted that two other insurers, included in the top five in this segment, VSK and Rosgosstrakh, did not include the gender factor in the list of considered characteristics of car owners.

“When choosing the factors, VSK's own statistics were taken into account, which most strongly shows the influence of the factor on the probability of an insured event, as well as on the amount of potential damage,” the VSK press service told Interfax.