Researcher tracks traffic accident risks by gender
Driving habits are often a subject of skirmishes in the battle of the sexes, but a recent UW survey has found that both sexes have about the same number of accidents in their driving career. What’s different is the accident rate compared to length of time someone has been driving.
“The longer a male motorist goes without having an automobile accident, the less likely he is to have one,” says the study’s author, UW Transportation Engineer Fred Mannering. “But a female motorist is just as likely to have an accident at any given time, whether she has gone five years without one or just had a wreck yesterday.”
Mannering bases his findings on a sample of 160 drivers—114 men and 46 women—who are UW faculty, staff or students. He speculates that perhaps there are “fundamental differences” in the way men and women process information while driving, or perhaps it is related to the fact that young males start out as such reckless drivers that “their risk-taking behavior naturally adjusts downward over time.”
Mannering also found that married women drivers had significantly lower accident risks than single women; drivers of either sex from high-income households had fewer accidents than low-income drivers; and that the older a woman was when she first obtained her license, the higher the accident risk.