Face it, gender differences in driving exist
I love these kinds of headlines: Texas Study Suggests That Distracted Driving Laws Should Target Women. I like definitive answers to why something is somebody’s fault. It’s easy to hem and haw and ride so many fences you get splinters up your butt, but a headline like that invites — no, demands — blame be laid.
This particular study, in Preventive Medicine Reports, focused on who uses cellphones behind the wheel more often, men or women. It was carried out at large intersections in six major Texas cities over two years, on medical and academic campuses.
Some of the results were expected: cellphone use has declined, but texting has increased; people driving alone were four times more likely to be talking on the phone; those under 25 were more likely to be engaged in conversation on their cell. The kicker? Women were 63 per cent more likely to talk on the phone while they were driving.
This type of survey often picks on age rather than gender, though dangerous driving habits always come down to insurance: who pays the most? The insurance industry doesn’t play around. Whoever causes the most damage pays the highest premiums — and that is usually an 18-year-old boy, give or take a year or three.
Statistical studies are really numbers soup. They love click-bait headlines like that one — and it worked. I clicked. But then I kept clicking, and realized you have to do a sophisticated cat’s cradle to gather every thread of pertinent information before you can make glorious, sweeping assumptions that women are terrible drivers. Or that young people are. Or old people.
One study, by the University of Michigan in 2011, was reported on under the banner: Study Shows Women More Likely to Cause Traffic Accidents, and, even setting aside the tic I get when I see the word “accident,” the headline isn’t even right.
When the researchers set up the parameters using “the General Estimate System data from a nationally representative sample of policereported crashes, the researchers expected to find that male-to-male crashes would account for 36.2 per cent of accidents, female-to-female would make up 15.8 per cent and male-to-female would make up 48 per cent of crashes. Instead, they found female-to-female accidents made up 20.5 per cent of all crashes, much higher than expected. Maleto-male crashes were lower than expected, at 31.9 per cent, and male-to-female crashes were 47.6 per cent.”
Let’s rewrite that headline: Study Shows Women Likely to Cause More Traffic Accidents Than We Originally Thought They Would.” The men are still causing more crashes. Yet the noise is all about women causing crashes.
To get back to those insurance numbers: Young men pay more than other demographics because they get into more crashes, and they tend to kill people when they do. Young men aggressively commit to their fate, because most of them believe they have superhuman powers and will never die.
They often have someone they’re trying to impress in the car with them: boys are three times more likely to do something dangerous if there’s a girl in the car, slightly more than when they are with a male. Every age group has the bumpers and dingers, but the catastrophic injuries — the most expensive payouts — pool here.
You can get any result you want from a survey if you word the questions a certain way, carry it out in a certain area or limit your scope with an eye to your outcome. Too many surveys finding their way onto national forums were funded by someone with vested interests in particular outcomes. The study noted at the top of this column admitted it was carried out near academic and medical campuses, probably skewing the results.
Anecdotally speaking, I actually believe that there were a higher number of females using their phones in that Texas survey. I believe younger women text more, young men drive more aggressively, people with young kids in the car can be greatly distracted, people in sports cars drive differently than people in pickups, and I believe the American Automobile Association quote that “seniors are outliving their ability to drive safely by an average of seven to 10 years.”
What matters isn’t a study that lets one segment smile smugly and declare themselves the winner, when every driver is capable of a lapse in judgment or a lack of skill that puts everyone in danger.
I find headlines using words that aim to be provocative, like “laws should target women” are counterproductive. I just believe that correct information should be used in how we train people, not how we disparage them.