Yes, men and women drive differently
LOOK BEYOND HEADLINES: Read the whole study — not specific data — and lay off sweeping generalizations
“Texas Study Suggests That Distracted Driving Laws Should Target Women” I love these kinds of headlines. Really, I do. I like definitive answers to why something is somebody’s fault. It’s easy to straddle so many fences but a headline like that invites — no, demands — blame be laid.
This particular study, in Preventive Medicine Reports, focused on who uses cellphones and texts behind the wheel more often, men or women. It was carried out at large intersections near academic campuses in six major Texas cities over two years. Some of the results were expected: actual cellphone use has declined, but texting has increased; people driving alone were four times more likely to be talking on the phone; and 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 driving.
Most of these types of surveys pick on age rather than gender. And the insurance industry doesn’t play around. He who causes the most damage pays the highest premiums, and that “he” is usually an 18-yearold boy, give or take a year or three.
Statistical studies are really numbers soup. They love clickbait headlines, like that one, and it worked. I clicked. But then I kept clicking, and realized you have to gather every thread of pertinent information before making 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.” The headline isn’t even right. When the researchers set up the parameters “(u)sing 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. Male-to-male crashes were lower than expected, at 31.9 per cent, and male-to-female crashes were 47.6 per cent.”
The men are still causing more crashes. Women are crashing into women at a rate of 20.5 per cent; men are crashing into men at a rate of 31.9 per cent, and men are crashing into women at a rate of 47.6 per cent. Yet the headline 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 with them: boys are three times more likely to do something dangerous if there’s a girl in the car, slightly more than that with a male.
Every age group has the bumpers and dingers, but catastrophic injuries — the most expensive payouts — pool here.
Part of the problem with surveys is you’re reading percentages and it becomes easy to ignore how large — or small — the actual study was. I reported on an Irish study last year about young drivers based on gender, but made sure to note how small the survey actually was (the girls came out ahead in that one). 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 certain 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 do believe there was 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 little kids in the car can be greatly distracted, people in sports cars drive differently than people in pickups, and I believe the AAA quote from the U.S, “seniors are outliving their ability to drive safely by an average of seven to 10 years.”
Yet I can probably find you statistics to disprove every one of those things. But what matters isn’t a study that lets one segment smugly declare themselves the winner, when every driver is capable of a lapse in judgment or a lack of skill that puts everyone in danger, whether for a single moment or for all of them.
I’m open to most discussions about gender differences in driving, because I believe they exist. My sons are better at parking than I am; I’m better at anticipating what other drivers are going to do. I’m still an excellent parker because it’s a skill you can learn, and they’ll likewise gain other experience as they get older. I’m currently spearheading a program for teen drivers, and I’ll state unconditionally that teen boys and girls have some definite behavioural differences. I find headlines using words like “laws should target women” counterproductive, even as they aim to be provocative.
I just believe that correct information should be used in how we train people, not how we disparage them.