Undoing Difference: Risk Classification and Gender Discrimination in Insurance Markets

• In Event: 069 - Section on Sociology of Law Paper Session. Promises and Problems of Sociology, Law, and Technology

Abstract

The elimination of facially discriminatory classifications in determining access to the market – from employment to housing to credit – is one of the signature developments of the last half century. Insurance represents a striking anomaly to this broader trend, one of the few institutional domains in American society where it is in most instances legally permissible to use gender to price contracts. This is particularly striking given that feminist activists led by the National Organization for Women launched a vigorous and sustained legal effort to challenge gender discrimination in insurance markets beginning in the early 1980s. Examining legal cases drawn from life insurance and auto insurance, our paper seeks to understand the surprising persistence of gender-based pricing in insurance. We argue that pricing technologies encoded gender in ways that made it difficult to “undo difference” in insurance markets. Accordingly, we suggest that cultural sociologists who think about the construction of groups and group boundaries largely in cognitive terms might do well to draw on existing work in science and technology studies that has attended to gender (and other categories such as race) as technical infrastructures as well as forms of cognition.

Authors

• Greta R. Krippner, University of Michigan

• Daniel Hirschman, University of Michigan