Car Insurance: Men have to pay more than Women

Hypothetical situation, not meaning to enforce stereotypes.
Lets say it was found that statistically, people of Jewish faith were better at repaying loans. (home loans, etc). Assume a bank realized that their Jewish clients were costing them less and earning them more per capita than any other subset of their clients. Suppose this bank then wanted to get more of these (Statistically) cheaper to maintain clients who were less likely to default on their loans. Suppose they were to charge a lower interest rate to anyone who could prove they were Jewish.

Then suppose the bank discovered that Single parents were defaulting on loans at a much higher rate than any of their other clients, and were declaring bankruptcy at a much higher rate, costing the bank lots of money. The bank then decides that in order to recoup these losses, they want to add a small monthly fee to the accounts of all single parents.

Now, you can make your own judgement on how different demographics deal with their money, but is ANY part of the above scenario ok?

We can argue with statistics in this case easily, correlation doesn't represent a cause. It may be the case that men are more likely to get in an accident, followers of Judaism are more likely to repay loans, or even that left handed people are more likely to speed on Sunday. None of that means being a man, being Jewish, or being left handed cause those conditions. The insurance companies could just be using a hot/cold gambling strategy. It is our expectations of those groups (often in the form of stereotypes) that lead us to believe that the statistics "just make sense."

To be clear, this isn't an argument against a business being able to use these things or not, only the idea that the statistics they reference are inherently meaningful just because they are statistics.

A couple months back when the EU was trying to bring in undiscriminating insurance I read that men under 25 weren't more likely to get in an accident. In fact, women under 25 were the most likely to get into an accident it was just that men were significantly more likely to be in a serious (and thus more expensive) accident.
I'm not trying to call you out for just regurgitating something you've heard in the past (since I'm doing the same - but I'll try to find the article) the only thing you have wrong, per se, is the "That ain't bias, that's math." If you're unaware how easily statistics can be manipulated to say what whoever's using them wants them to say; you're in for a rude awakening. I remember a video from an early stats class where the researcher used the same data set to prove two conclusions that were pretty much polar opposites of each other (I can't find it on youtube, though not for lack of trying - I've wanted to show it before now).

I have to suspect that, somewhere deep in the basement of some insurance company, there's an actuary who's calculated rates based on race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. If the actuary could get his hands on the data, that is.
If he could get more esoteric data, such as length of pinkie finger, he'd calculate that table too. There must be a bias, no matter how small. As /u/phedre pointed out, it's just math.
What do you think...would Catholics be more expensive to insure than Mormons?

I hear that argument a lot, but there's one flaw in it:
People who like the colour red are more likely to crash than people who like the colour pink. Would you support increasing insurance rates based on a person's favourite colour?

With disabilities, people get compensation from the government. With age, everyone goes through the same thing so it's not discrimination. Everything else is something that's reasonably changeable... except for gender. There's no excuse for categorising gender, it's just pure discrimination.

that's not true. women are statistically more likely to have an accident when you account for miles driven. If two teens are going to have the same estimated milage every year, by all rights the female should have a higher premium. But because insurance carriers, in the US at least, look at the total number of accidents by gender, not accounting for milage, they can point to the numbers and say "see, males have more accidents". Well no shit Sherlock, they drive 4x as many miles a year, so on the whole they'd have more accidents. By each driver, by milage, males have fewer accidnet.s

The whole idea of insurance is that a large group of people share the responsibility for a burden only a few could never handle.
Gender is little more than a chromosome. A few sets of genes that determine certain characteristics of your body.
What if they found out you had an aggressive gene? Or a lazy gene? Or a heart-attack gene, would it be okay to make those subgroups pay a larger fee?
No. Because it totally negates the whole idea of insurance. Insurance is to protect everybody, the more subgroups you make the less protection it offers. You might as well not have insurance if it's just you paying in money that you are just as likely to also pay out.

Women are more likely to be in an accident, men do more damage per crash. Also. Do you pay less for health insurance when statistically women use 1200% more?

So would you be fine discriminating against women in health insurance** making them pay more when their is statistical evidence they cost much more?

Again, it's not discrimination if financially motivated. If orange tires sold more than blue tires, and stores began to only carry orange tires, is that discrimination? Or is it adjusting your company's efforts to maximize revenue?
If data shows that women typically have higher hospital bills, then why is it unfair to charge them more considering they'll statistically use more of the insurance than a male?
I think you missed this part though:
Now if the insurance companies had no data to back up their actions and simply charged men more out of spite, yes, we'd have an issue.

They don't get charged more... that's the entire point I have been trying to get across, and I agree with you. Data doesn't lie and I have no issue charging women more for hospital bills and men more for auto-insurance, but the government has already stepped in saying you can't "discriminate" on health care costs, so what is your response to that?

Adult men under age 25 have the highest vehicular homicide rate. The statistics say you probably will have an accident, and in your age group and gender, that accident will be severe. The older you get if you stay accident free your rates will go down substantially.
Insurance is about assessing the risk of an event happening, and it's probable severity, and pricing the coverage accordingly. Auto insurance companies are not compelled by law to charge everyone the same, and if they were, good drivers would complain about subsidizing bad drivers, as is the case with health insurance.

Why must males now, by law, subsidize females health insurance?

Well, no what's happening is that thin people are subsidizing fat people, non smokers are subsidizing smokers, non diabetics are subsidizing diabetics, etc. But the concept is the same.
Health insurance doesn't have quite the same liberty as auto and p&c insurance. EVERYONE will die, but not every car will be wrecked and not every house will be burned to the ground; the only question is how much money will they burn in the hospital BEFORE they die.
Basically prior to Obamacare, if you had a preexisting known probably-terminal medical condition, and didn't already have insurance you were uninsurable, yet simultaneously, if you were an obese chainsmoker and never changed jobs (thus, your insurance didn't know you were an obese chainsmoker) you were insured probably at the same rate as a healthy thin person.
Now, companies are both forced to sell to everyone as no preexisting conditions can completely disqualify (which is good), but simultaneously, a lot of companies now really care about your weight and habits. They've realized obesity and vice cause chronic health problems that can cost them as much as more straightforward terminal diseases like aids, cancer, celiac, or diabetes.

auto insurance gender discrimination
Actuarial science is not discrimination. Stop thinking of it that way.
I acknowledge that the current MEDICAL insurance situation does discriminate against men on rates. But it used to discriminate on coverage against people with treatable diseases who live healthier then the obese. I assure you, if insurance companies were substantially losing money insuring women, a lobby would very quickly make it legal to charge men and women based on the statistics. A healthy man and a healthy woman, whatever the differences in health costs between them, are both substantially cheaper to treat over their lifetime then an obese person of either gender.
many young men are safer drivers than women as a class
Many, not all. The few tend to cause hideously expensive accidents while drinking. The actuarian says "okay, all young men combined cause x number of accidents costing y, and any given young man is z likely to cause one of those big accidents". It's more complicated then that but that's the concept; basically any factors that CONSISTENTLY predict the likelihood of an accident, have been factored into the pricing of auto insurance.
The whole point of actuarial science is that we cannot SEE the future. We can only predict it with math.