Testosterone-fuelled drivers will benefit from bid to erase gender inequality.
Conservative knickers - which, I'm reliably informed, tend to the racy rather than the sensible - are in a twist. Infernal activist judges, as the knicker-twisters like to call them, now say there can be no commercial discrimination based on gender.
This means that from the end of next year,
European and British insurance companies can no longer charge higher premiums to young male drivers, who tend to have more accidents than older men and women, because of the young's distressing habit of driving dangerously fast.
And blokes now won't pay more for life insurance - a form of discrimination based on older men's deplorable tendency to drop dead when ill-health strikes (women take note: Manflu kills). Women are likely to live on and on, even when hit with a life-threatening calamity, and charges reflect that.
But women's longevity cuts the other way too: they often receive smaller pensions than men, or have to pay more for them. They also pay more for health insurance because, on average, women cost the health system more.
No longer. Once the European Court of Justice ruling takes effect, premiums for car insurance and retirement products will be most affected, because that's where the statistics paint the clearest picture of gender disparity.
A few calls to New Zealand insurance reps reveal no such plans are afoot in Godzone. The Human Rights Act ensures insurance companies cannot deny coverage based on risk profile but they can charge more to some, less to others.
So women in NZ pay more than men for income protection cover because, say the insurance companies, they make more mental health and stress-related claims.
Then again, middle-aged, chain-smoking, hard-drinking journalists of cliche, such as me, fork out usurious amounts on life insurance each month.
I'm not complaining. But this month I think it would be nice to live in Europe.
A blow for gender equality, you might think. Not if you're a young woman struggling to meet your bills and are hit with a hike in car insurance.
Nor if you're a knicker-twister writing commentary for the English press, where the decision has been described as "asinine," "utter madness" and, my favourite, "political correctness gone mad". Is there any other kind?
Most of the commentators are men, who stand to gain more from the ruling, according to some calculations. This supports many women's contention that men are a bit thick.
Cynics (meaning the two insurance people I spoke to) say the decision is likely to lead to higher premiums overall because companies will manipulate things so women pay much more for car and life insurance and men slightly less, providing a bigger margin across all products.
Perhaps we can call this scenario political capitalism gone mad (PCGM). Except that success in manipulating regulations for commercial advantage is usually called business acumen, not PCGM.
But this really is gender discrimination. Women do deserve to pay much less for their better driving record - and ability to withstand Manflu.
Having fun or, as the dismal insurance trade describes it, risky behaviour, also deserves its due: higher fees, but if you survive the male rites of passage, lower health insurance costs. Huzzah.
Nobody comes out of this well: the judges (misguided), the insurance companies (rapacious) and the commentariat (stupid).
I can only applaud the sentiment behind addressing iniquity based on a person's sex. But this judgment actually increases the financial burden on women and does nothing about a much greater source of financial discrimination - the cost of childcare.
