Memo to Brussels: women are different
By Boris Johnson
(Filed: 26/06/2003)

One of life's mercies is that not all women drive like Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. No, not all women have humiliated me in a motor car race, as T P-T did the other day. You almost certainly missed it, but I agreed to go on Top Gear to see how fast I could drive a very small Japanese car round a track.

It was not a powerful machine. It could barely pull the skin off a rice pudding. But my competitive urges were engaged. I gave that car some serious welly. I knew that my time would be compared with the time already set by Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, and the red mist came down as I floored the throttle round the straight, and, to a lesser extent, round the bends.

My coach told me the trick was to aim for the apex of the curve, and sneer at death, so that is what I did. Well, folks, I would like to pretend to you that I wasn't really trying. I could plead that my fuel kept cutting out (it did).

But it wouldn't really wash, and nothing can efface the memory of a result that, in a hotly contested field, amounted to one of the most abject defeats I have recently experienced at the hands of a member of the female sex.

Tara beat me by two seconds. It is only after a good deal of reassurance that I have felt able even to talk about this in private, let alone in print.

One fragmentary consolation is that - according to a friend who drives cars fast - I may have misunderstood the position of the "apex" of the curve. The other point is that, as I say, Tara is not as other women.

Most women drive with much more caution than men. They don't barge into the traffic; they wait for a gap. They indicate. Though we can all think of counter-examples, it seems to be a reality that women take fewer risks, behind the wheel, than men.

When women have a prang, they are much less likely to total the machine. That is why women, as a sex, pay less for their car insurance than men. In the words of Andrew Briscoe, managing director of AA Insurance Services: "Women's claims tend to be smaller, and underwriters reward this by passing on lower premiums.''

This is a disparity based on a fact of life. It is part of the crooked timber of humanity out of which, as Kant puts it, no straight thing was ever made. And this good and natural thing, this harmless advantage accruing to the female sex in requital of their greater road safety, is noisome, of course, in the eyes of our rulers.

Brussels has determined that this amounts to unequal treatment of men and women. In the mad world of the social affairs directorate, run by Anna Diamantopolou, women's lower car insurance premiums are an anomaly.

They are an example of stereotyping, she has declared, and they must be stamped out. They will be done away with, the EU commission has proposed, along with stereotypical images of men and women of all kinds [report, 25 June].

"Sisters!" says Commissioner Anna, "let's burn those bra ads!" And in case the women of Europe feel disinclined to march for the right to pay higher car insurance, she has spied a further anomaly, another example of sexual stereotyping in insurance.

She believes that women would benefit from the compulsory equalisation of pension annuities. She seems to think that what women would lose in car insurance, they would gain in pension annuity payments. In so far as that is her belief, she is quite potty.

It is true that women, on average, receive lower annuity payments than men. That is for the very simple reason that they tend to live about four years longer than men, at the least. Go around an old folks' home, and see who the real stayers are.

Even Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who smokes, drinks and drives like Emerson Fittipaldi, will almost certainly outlive me by several years. Women tend to receive lower annuities than men because that, bluntly, is how the annuity system works. There comes a terrible moment when we must use our pension pot to buy an annuity, a yearly payment calculated, by our insurers, on the basis of how long we have left on the planet.

They are a hard-headed bunch, these insurers. They suck their teeth and see you clearly and see you whole. If they see a corpulent clapped-out ex-politician given to drinking and smoking, they will consult their logarithmic tables, and establish that he will peg out pretty soon.

That means they can afford, statistically, to give him what looks like a more generous annuity; though it is not generous, of course. It simply reflects their cynical assessment of his longevity. If, on the other hand, they see a fit fell-walking female non-smoker, they will tend to aim for a lower annuity, on the grounds that they will be stumping up for longer.

It is nothing really to do with sexual stereotyping; it is to do with risk; and a realistic assessment of the way our universe is constructed. It is wholly unreasonable to expect these insurers to ignore these facts.

And if Diamantopolou gets her way, and imposes equality, do you think for one second that the insurers will level up, to bring women's annuity payments in line with men's? Ha! Of course not. In the past 12 years, annuity yields have halved (which is one reason why David Currie and other Tory MPs have been right to campaign for the end of compulsory purchase).

There are already doubts about whether insurers can afford their existing annuity commitments. If equality is forced upon them by Brussels, they will simply shave the men's annuities, and the women won't get a bean.

Diamantopolou's wheeze is a classic example of bureaucrats using a treaty base to push forward a proposal that flies in the face of common sense. It shows perfectly why we need a referendum on any new treaty text she could invoke.