Currently, car insurance companies are allowed to determine the rate that a customer will pay for insurance based off of the customer’s gender, which insurance companies do quite often - with differences in insurance rates often exceeding 10% just based off of gender. This is unfair for several reasons, the first one being that gender is a factor that is out of a person’s control. Since an individual cannot choose his/her own gender, it's morally wrong to use this as a factor when determining what they will pay for a service - in this case insurance - just as it’s wrong to use gender when determining employability, which New Hampshire already has laws against. This is also unfair because being a certain gender does not make you an individually worse or better driver, so it is further unfair to individuals to generalize them in this way. Even if one gender is statistically more likely to cause a crash, that does not mean that every individual of that gender is. Further, data actually shows that men are less likely to cause a crash than women per mile driven. According to the NHTSA, men are found at fault for 6.1 million crashes per year, whereas women are found at fault for 4.4 million. This shows that, on average, men cause 28% more crashes than women per year, however data provided by both the U.S. DOT and Federal Highway Administration show that men drive approximately 39% more miles per year than women, meaning that men actually cause fewer crashes per mile driven. Since almost all insurance companies use miles driven per year as a rate-determining factor, men end up being double-charged for this discrepancy.

On January 1st, 2019, The insurance commissioner of California introduced a new regulation prohibiting the use of gender as a determining factor for car insurance rates, making California the seventh state to do so. The regulation is titled The Gender Non-Discrimination in Automobile Insurance Rating Regulation. http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2019/upload/nr003-18GenderNon-DiscriminatonAutoRating01-03-18.pdf

This petition is asking Chris Nicolopoulos, the insurance commissioner of New Hampshire, to implement a regulation that parallels or achieves the same goal as the regulation set fourth by the insurance commissioner of California - to prevent car insurance companies from using gender as a factor when determining the rate that customers will pay.