Women Drivers Vs. Men Drivers

Women drivers vs. men drivers? Who is worse? My question is "worse" because to me, women drivers and men drivers both are lousy drivers, by and by. But who are worse, women drivers or men drivers?

This question arises because a recent experience has caused me to ponder the woman driver vs. man driver question. As a pedestrian, I was walking across Michigan Avenue. Well, Michigan Avenue in sleepy ol' Saginaw, Michigan, is not quite as busy as Michigan Avenue in Chicago, not by a long shot. And so, on this sunny Saturday afternoon, there were no cars coming from within three blocks in either direction.

Then, suddenly, a Jeep from a side street a full block down turned onto Saginaw's Michigan Avenue and screeched its tires and started bearing down on me. They were not trying to run me over; they were just in an apparent hurry, and hell be damned. I quickened my gait and shouted an expletive, to which the bypassing motorist answered with a horn toot.

It turns out that to fulfill my 12-letter expletive, the motorist would have been required to engage in a same-sex encounter, because the motorist was a female.

"Stereotype," I told myself, because my assumption was that this was a man driver, not a woman driver. Otherwise, my shout would have contained only five letters.

"Story idea," I next told myself. Time to go to Google.

Women Drivers Vs. Men Drivers

Since I'm one of those sensitive feminist sort of fellows, like Alan Alda from the past generation or Brad Pitt from this one, I'm sort of hoping that the research will favor the females. However, a top Google item on my pop-up screen for "women drivers vs. men drivers" is from the male point of view, spike.com. A 94-second video promises to totally answer the question once and for all, and purports to do so via one quote from one source: A Johns Hopkins study shows that women are engaged in 5.7 crashes per million miles driven, compared to only 5.1 crashes for men. "So who drives better? The guys have it," spike.com concludes.

But hold your ponies! Women drivers vs. men drivers? Selected statistics can lie. Your author wants to defend the females, even though a woman driver has just abused me out on Michigan Avenue.

There are 15 response comments on spike.com. (This is supposed to be a "major" website? Many authors here on Associated Content draw way more comments than that!) Anyway, "Oliviadog" comes to the rescue on behalf of the ladies by completing the sentence: "According to a controversial study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine and Public Health, women are more likely to be involved in car crashes than men -- despite the fact that men are three times more likely to be killed when they DO crash. ... So, women may have the fender benders, but they don't end up dead."

Of course, our analysis requires a probe beyond spike.com. The Johns Hopkins study indeed exists, although it's 12 years old. Among the sites that assert that women actually are better drivers (or at least, not as bad) is insurance.com, which actually sells insurance. But again bias may enter the picture, because women so often wear the financial pants in the family, and so the women will be the ones shopping for insurance.

Let's Just All Be Safe

Since your author is not writing a doctoral thesis, here is an intuitive conclusion: Most studies will show that men are involved in higher-risk crashes, regardless of which gender is involved in the highest number. This is because teenage and young adult male drivers are more prone to excess than teenage and young adult females.

This writeup has included some humor and the spike.com video has some chuckle moments too, such as a guy who says, "I think probably men looking at women are the worse drivers." That's happened to me. But bottom line, it's no laughing matter, not when more than 40,000 men and women are killed each year on America's highways and byways. For my prior writeup on this topic, click here.

How about we all make a commitment to safer motoring?

SOURCES

http://www.spike.com/video/men-vs-women-drivers/29060

http://www.junkscience.com/news2/womendri.html

http://www.insurance.com/auto-insurance/safety/are-men-better-drivers-than-women.aspx