The proposed directive on gender equality in the access to and supply of goods and services touches on crucial issues that have a direct impact on the life of women in Europe: equality in everyday life and the elimination of discrimination for services that are essential to enable women to live in present-day society.
Discrimination practices are still very common, such as discrimination against women in the access to banking services, loans, and also to housing.
The debate on insurances
In some countries there is opposition of insurance companies to the draft directive because this legislation would prohibit the use of actuarial factors broken down by sex in the calculation of premiums. In most current systems the mutualisation of risks is done between women as a group or between men as a group. Studies show that the age difference between men and women will disappear in the coming yeas. As this evolution is commonly admitted, insurance companies should take into account this demographic trend.
The sex factor is not the most relevant one for calculating life expectancy of women and men, with women working more and women's and men's lifestyle being more comparable. It is clear that other factors linked to lifestyle are more important than sex for the calculation of the life expectancy of individuals.
Pensions
In the area of pensions, the tendency in EU member states to replace or supplement state provision by private insurance makes it even more necessary to apply the gender equality principle that applies for statutory social insurance.
If shifts in government's policies force people to join private pensions schemes, it is also their responsibility to make sure that those are not discriminatory against women and that they do not reinforce existing patterns that already put women at a disadvantage in terms of income.
The diverse forms of discrimination against women in the labour market (pay gap, forced part-time, horizontal and vertical segregation and their care-related career breaks) lead to lower pensions rights and overall to the feminisation of poverty and therefore the prohibition of discrimination in annuity-based pensions is vital.
Health insurance
In terms of health insurance, insurers take into account the probability of childbirth to determine the individual risk of hospitalisation and thus automatically apply a higher premium to women. It is not acceptable that the risks linked to pregnancy are shared only among women as a sex, while there are also many women who don't or can't have children. The exclusion of pregnancy and maternity related costs from insurance contracts constitutes direct discrimination on the basis of sex.