Gender can no longer be used in California auto insurance rates

California has become the seventh state to ban auto insurers from using gender as one of the factors that they can use to calculate the rates customers pay.

But as regulators push the industry toward formulas that have more to do with how a car is driven than by whom, the decision by the state’s Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones to ban gender also carries a certain irony: in the name of equality, the change is likely to result in cheaper insurance premiums for young male drivers, who are statistically riskier to insure, at the expense of young female drivers, who are statistically less risky but now will likely pay more.

The difference could be as much as $500, and that’s if insurers split the difference between what male teenagers and their female counterparts pay now, said Penny Gusner, a consumer analyst with carinsurance.com, an online marketplace for car insurance.