Cheap Car Insurance for Women

There are a few cheap car insurance brands aimed at women, such as Diamond, Go Girl and Sheilas' Wheels. Should you go with them if you're a woman? Not necessarily.

NimbleFins market tests show that women are likely to get a cheaper car insurance quote from a mass-market brand that is not gender focused. So if price is the priority then a women should compare quotes from the market and not limit themselves to women-targeted car insurance. With a choice of well over 100 brands on most comparison engines, why limit yourself?

Plus, the car insurance providers for women have a few flaws, in our opinion, that can be avoided by going to a gender-neutral car insurance provider.

For example, Sheilas' Wheels charges up to 12p per minute for customer service calls (including claims and renewals). You can get free customer service calls from many other brands.

And the child car seat or booster cover after a claimed accident is on the low side with only £100 of cover from Sheilas' Wheels and Go Girl. (But Diamond offers good cover for car seats, up to the replacement cost.)

Cheap female car insurance

However, female-targeted car insurance brands (Diamond, Go Girl and Sheilas' Wheels) offer one perk that may appeal to women: extra cover for handbags stolen from a locked car, beyond the cover for personal belongings.

For example, Diamond provides up to £200 for personal belongings and also up to £300 for handbags, Go Girl offers £150 for personal belongings and also £200 for handbags, and Sheilas' Wheels offers £200 of cover for each. In contrast, most car insurance policies would include handbags within the personal belongings cover, not have an additional limit for handbags.

Cheap car insurance for woman driver

Numerous studies show that women pay less for car insurance than men on average.

A woman driver may have an easier time finding cheap car insurance because their profile is less risky than a man's (but this certainly varies from woman to woman!), such as fewer miles driven per year, fewer past driving offences and a safer choice of car. Simply put, more men have risk factors in their profile that will lead to higher premiums.

For example, overall, women drive less than men. The latest National Travel Survey showed that men travel 15% further (6,389 miles per person per year) compared to women (5,576 miles per person per year). And fewer miles on the road means less chance of an accident, all else equal—one reason why women pay less per year for car insurance.

And a woman driver is also likely to get cheaper car insurance because women have fewer collisions than men. For example, Department for Transport data shows that women are involved in far fewer collisions where the driver is over the drink-drive limit:

That said, since the Gender Directive was passed by the European Court of Justice in 2012, it is illegal for insurers to consider gender when calculating premiums. So a woman driver and a man driver should pay the same premium for cheap car insurance—if they have a similar profile.

Cheap car insurance for young female drivers

Many young drivers opt for a telematics car insurance policy to save money on their premium, and young female drivers might see an even larger pricing benefit in the long run (compared to male drivers). Why? Not to cast aspersions on young male drivers, but they might tend to drive in ways (e.g. faster acceleration, heavier braking) that trigger yellow or red warnings from the telematics tracking system. Whereas young female drivers might (yes, generalising here...) be better at driving habits that keep the tracking system happy and result in lower premiums upon renewal (compared to males). In theory...

And NimbleFins has studied the telematics market and found that the cheapest policies for young female (and male) drivers are telematics. Comparing the 5 cheapest regular and telematics policies, telematics policies could save a young female driver 13.1% or £102 on average.