Why don’t women take out life insurance – and why it matters more than we think

Let’s get one thing straight up front: insurance is not exactly the topic people light up over at dinner parties. In fact, most of us hear the word and would genuinely rather discuss our latest breast exam, rising electricity prices, or whether our air fryer really has changed our life.

That is, until one day you wish you’d thought about it earlier - when something unimaginable has happened.
 

A real-life story: when “we’ll do it later” never comes

I want to share a story from about 10 years ago.

My hubby and I had some really close friends who we caught up with a lot over a glass of wine (or two). He was an executive earning a strong income, she was building a successful career, and life was pretty grand for them.

They travelled well, bought nice things, worked hard to build a good life together and were starting to think about the next chapter, including having a family.

One night over dinner, I brought up the topic of personal insurance.

After almost three decades in financial services, I can somehow find a way to bring money into almost any conversation (there is a reason people stop inviting finance peeps to dinner parties). Given their stage of life and future family plans, I genuinely wanted to talk to them not only about life insurance, but about protecting their incomes and themselves.

I felt it was really important to make sure they’d be protected should something unforeseen impact their health.

Like most people in their thirties, they felt invincible.

Insurance sat somewhere between writing a will, stretching properly before exercise and finally figuring out what all the buttons on the superannuation portal actually meant.

I get it. Even I can sense when the conversation gets flicked to “so where’s your next holiday?”

A few weeks later I raised it again - outside of dinner, wine and social catch ups. Once again, they brushed it off. They were healthy, young, successful, and focused on living their lives.

Eventually, I stopped pushing, aside from the occasional gentle reminder that I really felt it was important they put some protection in place.

The tragedy of this story is that they never got the chance.

The financial impact of the unexpected: What happened next

About nine months later - just before midnight - she was pregnant, and he was restless in his sleep. He decided to move into the spare room to let her sleep.

Not long after, he suffered a severe heart attack.

She didn’t hear him at all, and when she went to find him in the morning, it was too late. He had passed away.

This truly is the unimaginable.

I often reflect on our conversations and wonder:

• why they never took out insurance to protect themselves, especially given where they were at in life
• whether there was anything else I could have done differently to influence their decision

Ultimately, insurance is one of those things that gets put in the “too hard basket” or the “I’ll get to it one day” list.

For many people, one day never arrives.

The 'life admin' barrier: Why don’t we take out insurance?

Why do so many Australians - and women in particular - avoid insurance?  I believe a large part of the problem is that many women simply are not engaging with insurance in the same way men historically have.

Insurance sits in the same category as writing a will, getting a colonoscopy, changing your super investment option or figuring out all the passwords saved in seventeen different places.  We know we should deal with it, but somehow cleaning out the junk drawer or watching three hours of Netflix feels significantly more appealing.

Insurance can feel complicated and full of “too hard basket” life admin.

The terminology alone is enough to switch people off:

• Income Protection
• Total and Permanent Disability (TPD)
• Trauma (or Critical Illness) cover
• Life Cover
• Waiting periods (the time you must wait before you can claim)
• Benefit periods (the length of time you can receive payments)

And then there are the definitions, which often sound like they were written by someone who genuinely enjoys reading terms and conditions for fun (probably because they are).

The gender insurance gap: Why women are even less likely to engage

This insurance avoidance applies to both men and women.  What I have observed is that women, in particular, are far less likely to engage in insurance conversations.

Interestingly, it’s rarely because women don’t care about protecting themselves or their families. In fact, I’d argue women are often the protectors of everyone else.

When it comes to households and families, women are the master organisers: remembering school excursions, organising birthdays, replacing school shoes, knowing exactly where everyone’s passport is at all times.

Yet when it comes to protecting themselves financially, women often place themselves last.

Research conducted in March 2025 from the Council of Australian Life Insurers’ (CALI) found only around 3 in 10 women in the workforce were aware they held any life insurance cover, compared to almost 4 in 10 men. 

Women were also consistently less likely to report holding every major type of insurance cover:

• Life Insurance: 44% of men reported holding a policy compared to just 36% of women;
• Income protection, the gap was 33% for men versus 26% for women; and
• Critical illness and trauma cover showed an even wider divide, with 20% of men reporting they held cover compared to only 14% of women.

Perhaps most concerning of all, women were significantly more likely to report having no life insurance coverage whatsoever. According to the CALI research, 38% of women said they had no cover at all, compared to 30% of men.

And yet financially, women are often the very people who can least afford to be unprotected.

Zurich has analysed its insurance policies globally and found that a significantly higher proportion of policies are set up to protect men compared with women.

This has always puzzled me.  Across most households, if something happened to her, the family system would be completely shattered.

A question worth asking yourself

I want you to pause and ask yourself this:

If something major happened to you, how would it impact you financially?

By “major” I mean a health related issue -  think:

• cancer
• heart attack or stroke
• or something that stops you from working for six months or longer

What would that do to your household finances?

Now ask the next question.

If, like many households, only the male partner is properly insured - what would life look like if the female partner suffered one of these conditions?

Think about:

• who would care for her
• who would care for the kids
• how would her income be supplemented
• who would manage the household
• who would do all the unpaid work that women so often carry

One more thing to consider – if you are sitting here thinking ‘It won’t happen to me’, according to the Zurich ‘Cost of Care – Volume 2’ published in 2023, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women with an estimated 20,668 cases diagnosed in 2023, and in 2022 1.32 million or 1 in 20 people had heart, stroke and vascular disease. 

How much cover do you actually need?

When it comes to protecting ourselves, we need to think about everything we need in life.

There is no “one size fits all” answer, but there are four main types of personal insurance:

• Life Insurance
• Total and Permanent Disability (TPD) Insurance
• Trauma (or Critical Illness) Insurance
• Income Protection

To understand each in more detail, you can visit the Zurich website.

When considering cover, it’s important to think through what you would need in an ideal world if the unimaginable happened, including:

• repayment of debt
• replacing income
• medical-related costs
• future education costs for children

When insurance isn’t enough

Coming back to my friends’ story, he did have life insurance through super - but it was nowhere near enough to provide for his family.

She was forced to make decisions she never expected:

• moving interstate
• returning to full time work shortly after her baby was born
• delaying the purchase of their family home

In an ideal world:

• both incomes would have been replaceable for a number of years
• there would have been money to buy a home
• and funding for education would have been set aside

That simply wasn’t their reality.

Now this story has focused on him not having insurance, but imagine for a second if they were a young family and the tables were turned. The scenario would be he is now a widow with a toddler, trying to juggle the demands of a young family, an executive role, and the loss of his wife.  The importance of having insurance on both members of a couple is vital, as can be demonstrated with this example. 

A final thought

Both men and women tend to underestimate how much would unravel if she were suddenly unable to work - even temporarily.

We still think about insurance through the old school breadwinner lens. But anyone who has tried to replace what a woman does in a household knows that logic falls apart pretty quickly.

So as you’re reflecting on your own situation - whether you don’t have insurance at all, or whether it only covers one partner - take a moment to truly consider the role women play.

Insurance needs to be about recognising the role women play in holding lives together - and making sure things don’t completely fall apart when life doesn’t go to plan.

Unlike my friends.