Regarding the car insurance, I suspect the industry are loving the new EU thingy cos it means they can rake in hundreds of millions more £££ without paying out anything additional (female drivers won’t suddenly become more of a risk), and they’ll do all they can not to reduce male premiums.
There’s no way they can reduce their premiums as before they could have a reasonable idea of the risk profile on their books. Now with no way to differentiate they have to work on the worst case (male) rather than an average as they could end up with a book full of just male drivers.