Gendered Market Devices: The Persistence of Gender Discrimination in Insurance Markets1

This article explores the reasons for the stubborn persistence of gender discrimination in insurance long after gender classifications have been banned in employment, housing, and credit markets. In order to understand why insurance is the last bastion of overt, legally sanctioned discrimination in the post-Civil Rights era, I draw on a historical analysis of political contestation surrounding insurers' pricing practices in life and auto insurance markets in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that insurers' persistent discrimination can be explained by attending to the way in which gender comes to be embedded in the tools insurers use to price risk. This analysis has implications for understanding how social difference can be understood not simply as providing a context for market behavior but as built into the infrastructure of the economy itself, a durable part of the apparatus used to price and value.