Only one in four women can decipher the language of insurance

Women and insurance. The union is not the happiest. It seems that only one in four women can decipher what is stated in a policy and thus in an insurance contract. Not only that. Barely 25% of Italian women are familiar with insurance concepts and products, compared to 35% of men. Women, however, are more sincere: 75% admit to having little insurance expertise, while 65% of men say they are very knowledgeable, even if this is not the case. These are some of the key findings of a survey conducted by Ivass and the University of Milan Bicocca on the insurance skills of Italians.

"Italians' knowledge of insurance is very low, especially among women: just 25.5 per cent of women demonstrate insurance skills, compared to 35.9 per cent of men, i.e. more than 10 per cent less," emphasises Emanuela Rinaldi, Professor of Sociology of Cultural Processes at the University of Milan Bicocca, who coordinated the project "Objective EFFE Female Empowerment for a Fairer Future". The University of Milan, in particular a behavioural research team, participated with Doxa in an Ivass research on the insurance knowledge of Italians, on a representative sample of more than 2,000 people.

The research shows that only one in three women (32.5% of the sample) recognise the insurance concepts of premium, deductible or maximum, compared to 49.3% of men, while less than one in four (18.5%) know how to describe insurance products such as accident policies, supplementary pension coverage and death policies, concepts that are also difficult for men (only 22.4% know them).

"It is true that women show a lower level of basic knowledge than men, but the real gap is smaller than it appears from the numbers, because women are fully aware of their limitations (75% rate their insurance competence as medium-low), while men show high levels of overconfidence: 65% rate their competence as medium-high," explains Veronica Cucchiarini, co-author of the research together with Professor Riccardo Viale, of the University of Milan Bicocca.

Italians' relationship with insurance communication is also problematic. More than 50 per cent of respondents are dissatisfied with the comprehensibility of insurance communication, and only 34 per cent rate the information set of insurance products as 'fairly comprehensible'," the research states. The lowest scores on the quality of insurance communication are those attributed by the population with a higher educational qualification (university degree). Italians especially object to the excessive length of texts and the use of "self-referential terminology" and call for better comprehensibility of contractual language (54.1%) and greater clarity on specific aspects, such as deductibles and overdrafts (53.2%), duration of contracts (44.1%) and which cases are covered or not covered (42.5%).