If you’re looking for reasons why your car insurance premiums have gone up in the last few months, you might want to go back to the EU gender ruling. Unfortunately, this was something that wasn’t as reported in the press as you might imagine. The truth is that a lot of insurers used to give “breaks” on premiums based on the gender of the driver. The new EU ruling that came effective 21 December 2012 indicates that insurers cannot take gender into account when calculating premiums. This is actually illegal at this point. Car insurance and motor insurance as a whole will be affected the most, but other forms of insurance will be affected as well.

What this really means is that young men might see a decline in premiums, but women will usually see an increase in premiums. That’s something that can be pretty hard to deal with, especially when money is already tight for all of us.

Thankfully, women in the UK can fight back by looking into telematics-based car cover, which takes into account their actual driving behavior. You don’t have to take these increases lying down. Even though telematics sounds new, it really isn’t. What you’ll be getting is a little “box” that is installed into your vehicle. It even helps you if you have an accident, because help can be sent directly to your location. If your vehicle is ever stolen, the telematics unit can be used to discover the location. This is also something that criminals can’t just easily remove, which means that even if they were to search your vehicle top and bottom for the tracking device, they’re not going to be able to find it. Trust us, this is very good news no matter which way you slice it.

You should still be shopping around for quotes. This isn’t the time to get discouraged and think that all hope is lost. This is something that you’re going to need no matter what, so you might as well figure out the best policy for you.

The usual advice about coverage applies — going for the cheapest coverage possible may leave you exposed in some pretty nasty ways, so you want to still read over your policy before you really commit. This will allow you to look at what exclusions the insurance company has, if any apply. Good luck!