ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Health Economics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1627096
This article is part of the Research TopicPublic Health Outcomes: The Role of Social Security Systems in Improving Residents' Health Welfare, Volume IIView all 17 articles
The Impact of Women's Individualization on Commercial Insurance Purchase Behavior: Evidence from China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shanxi University of Finance and Economics, Taiyuan, China
- 2Beijing Technology and Business University, BeiJing, China
- 3Capital University of Economics and Business, BeiJing, China
- 4Bank of China Limited Hebei branch, Shijiazhuang, China
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Introduction: Women's individualization, which enables them to become unshackled from their family bondage and become more independent, amplifies exposure to occupational hazards, gender discrimination, work-family conflicts, and health risks, increasing the need for risk mitigation. Providing pioneering empirical evidence, this study quantifies how individualization reshapes Chinese women's commercial insurance demand by integrating social theory with risk management principles. Methods: Based on the latest three-wave data from the China Comprehensive Social Survey, we analyze the impact of women's individualization on commercial insurance purchasing behavior using various methods such as the probit model, instrumental variable method, and propensity score matching. Results: Women's individualization can significantly increase the probability of purchasing commercial medical insurance by 1.430% and commercial endowment insurance by 0.743%. This effect operates through heightened risk management awareness, increased purchasing power, and enhanced cognitive ability. The impact is stronger among employed women, those with higher wealth, poorer health, younger and middle-aged women, and women in central and eastern China. Conclusions: This study reveals that women's individualization motivates them to transfer personal risks through insurance purchasing, demonstrating how social transformation shapes financial decision-making. Crucially, findings inform stakeholders: Policymakers are advised to prioritize insurance subsidies for vulnerable women and adapt regulations to regional market needs; Insurers should innovate tailored products addressing individualized women's distinct risk profiles; Women should proactively mitigate personal risks through tailored insurance solutions; Researchers are offered a novel framework linking social transformation to financial behavior, urging further cross-cultural investigation.
Keywords: women's individualization, risk, Health, Income, Cognition, Commercialinsurance
Received: 12 May 2025; Accepted: 04 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 WANG, Gao, Liu, Li and Bai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lifei Gao, lifeigao@btbu.edu.cn
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