Risky Business: Unveiling the Gender Insurance Gap
Join us for this introduction to our ongoing conversation in 2024 about the biggest threat to women's financial security – and what you need to know about it to protect yourself.
Can you remember a time when you talked about finances with a friend? Some of us can – but still more can’t. Talking about money and the things that threaten our financial security is still pretty taboo for a lot of people. These conversations can be especially challenging for women – half the world’s population. Women are affected by all kinds of gender gaps – but some of the most threatening ones are financial gender gaps.
One financial gender gap you probably don’t know about is the Gender Insurance Gap. It refers to the sizable imbalance in protection against financial risks experienced between men and women.
As an insurance company committed to innovating in a regulated industry and equipping people with knowledge so they can make smart life choices for themselves, Getsafe is passionate about shedding light on this issue. We want everyone to have equal opportunities for financial security, but first talking about financial risk needs to be normalised. That’s why we’re here.
Join us as we kick off this ongoing conversation exploring the challenges women face when it comes to financial risks, learn what the Gender Insurance Gap is and how it works, and discover the proactive steps we can all take to bridge it.
But first let’s find out about financial risk, what the Gender Insurance Gap looks like and why it’s such an important topic.
What’s “financial risk”?
You know what the words “financial” and “risk” mean on their own, but what are financial risks really? It’s a great question because what we’re talking about isn’t necessarily the sort of financial risk you take investing in stock. We’re talking about true financial risks.
These are things that could destabilise your income, pension or health – for example, a fire that wipes out your house or apartment building and all your stuff with it. Or it could come in the form of being held liable for accidentally injuring someone else. Or an injury that keeps you from working long-term. The cost that comes with these things represents a threat to your financial stability.
According to Xenia Boulamatsis, Getsafe’s VP of Product, “These are the risks people don’t want to think about, but this is where we can really help … I feel there’s still a lot of education to be done within the industry around personal financial risks, and then actually making it a doable feat to navigate them.”
What does the Gender Insurance Gap look like?
Source: Getsafe data
Our Senior Data Engineer, Bose Oladipo, pulled some numbers on the gender distribution at Getsafe. Among our own customer base, only 37.8% are women. For those 25 years old and under, it’s 46.1%. Across the industry, women are consistently underinsured.
This means that the majority of women are leaving themselves open to financial risks like loss of income in the event of long-term illness, old-age poverty from not having enough of a liveable pension, and more. But why?
It’s not just the fact that we’re not talking regularly about finances and how to navigate them, but the gender pay gap and its consequences play a role here, too. It literally leaves women with less money to invest in themselves. What compounds this is that often people in general, but women in particular don’t have access to the right resources to get informed and get to grips with a topic as complex to the average person as insurance.
The gender pay gap keeps them from covering themselves with income protection for when they can’t work, private pension to supplement their public pension, and even things like contents insurance to cover their belongings and liability insurance to cover accidental damage. Without the money up front to start investing in these financial protections, when life happens the cost can be more than women bargain for.
How the system drives the gap
Two of the big existential questions in life are:
- What happens if I get seriously ill or injured?
- What happens when I get old?
Insurance for income protection and private pension were created to help face those two questions head-on by making sure we have money to support ourselves in the event of a major illness or injury, or when we’re old and can’t work. But for women, these questions can carry special weight, since across the board all kinds of data show that the system we live in is imbalanced.
When it comes to income protection, Bose highlights the catch that many women face: “The policy depends on your career choice, but then career choice is also still super gendered. For example, only a third of people working in science and engineering in Germany are women.”
Bianca Foesel, Getsafe’s Claims Lead, points out how gender affects pensions in that, “there are many women out there who give up a big portion of their pension while out of the job market due to child-rearing.”
Source: Getsafe data
According to Bose, Getsafe numbers show an evident Gender Insurance Gap for both income protection and private pension insurance policies. Only 32.8 % of our income protection customers are women, while for private pension it’s 35.8 %. What’s more, women being underinsured in this aspect holds true across the industry.
Women are again left exposed to these financial risks because of the Gender Insurance Gap.
Closing the gap
Closing the Gender Insurance Gap is why Getsafe is starting this conversation.
Gender inequality is a real threat, and the financial insecurity it can create is a real fear. The best way to dispel fear is through knowledge and guidance, and Getsafe is on a mission to guide people in making smart life choices. But working to change them goes beyond education. We need to look at the systems we live and work in, and the way we do things in the financial sector so that Getsafe can change how insurance is done. Join us in our mission to close the Gender Insurance Gap by having these conversations with us.
