Hmm, interestingly, this link shows that there is a significant difference in the reaction times of male and female olympic sprinters. For whatever it’s worth.
The microsecond responses measured in Darth’s linked study look very interesting. I wonder how the numbers would compare if you took a group of, say, female twitch gamers and compared them to “average” men. And then male gamers. I would not hesitate to state that computer gaming has had a significant positive effect on my (female) reflexes and spatial awareness.
Although anecdotes do not equate to statistical significance, I know I’m actually a good driver. Having been in a few near-misses that were only avoided due to my reflexes (and not because I was following too closely or anything like that). And my reflexes were definitely not above-average until I had been gaming for a year or so.
I am curious how large the sample size was.
Well, group vs. group statistics are basically irrelevant when looking at the individual. Men are generally taller than women - but there are millions upon millions of women taller than me, and there are women out there who are taller than billions of men.
I have no statistics, but I always assumed that insurance rates were higher for males because insurance companies had run the stats themselves and found that men were the worse drivers.
Here’s how I look at it, men are better drivers on average but have a larger variance. It’s the low end of the bell curve that gets in accidents. Insurance companies couldn’t care less that the average guy has better spacial recognition than women, they care about the jackholes at the lower end that hit things.
Not to get too far off topic, but at the amateur level the races are much shorter, the cars are much slower, and the physical demands are significantly less than at professional levels. Yet there are still very few female drivers.
The reason for the lack of female race car drivers is not (primarily, at least) physical.
deleted, off topic
Yep, focusing on one end of the curve will always give a distorted picture. The majority of high-flying executives with massive wages are male. Looking at one end only, you get a distorted image that neatly misses the point that the majority of homeless people, and workers in extremely dangerous jobs eeking out a living, are also male. Similarly, only looking at the bottom end (asking who statistically is “worse” in terms of number of accidents only) also has a potential distortative effect. It would be interesting to also see statistics on people who have never had a car accident, broken down by gender.
This, as of course was mentioned above, is due to the fact that men drive much more often and for longer distances than women, all else being equal. For two equal drivers, one whom drives 100 miles per week and the other 200, the latter will be twice as likely to get in an accident, and the insurance rates will reflect this. [lots of assumptions here, for illustrative purposes only, &c.]
The greatest cause of this discrepancy has to do with commuting. Women (in the US at least) are far more likely to be stay at home parents than men are, if only due to old fashioned gender roles. The average soccer mom will drive far less than anyone with a normal commute, and women everywhere stand to benefit from reduced insurance rates, whether or not they are actually stay at homes.
So what we really want is a accidents per hour driven metric of some kind.
I’d imagine that would average out the road warriors from the soccer moms.
I have a suspicion that per hour driven, male wrecks are less frequent but more severe than female ones.
There also needs to be a metric for hitting fixed objects- that seems to be much more of a female thing than a male one in my limited experience.
There is generally less social pressure for women to drive than men. I had to get myself a cheap car and get on the road at a fairly young age because I was a young man with places to go, dammit. My sister on the other hand still doesn’t own a car at 25 and no one knows if she can drive or not, since there always seems to be some nice young man ready to give her a lift. :rolleyes: I would think I’m probably a better driver simply due to experience.
Talking about F1/NASCAR/WRC is silly. Do you go through Rally Finland on your way to work? People with the dullest reflexes can get themselves to work and the store if they aren’t passed out or falling down drunk, any skill beyond that level is not relevant do driving on public roads.
A little anecdotal comparison, anyone? I got my driver’s license 50 years ago. My vision is mostly in one eye so that I do not have good spatial judgment at all. I did not have a driver’s education course. My mother has always refused to ride in the car with me although I have a beautiful driving record. She prefers any male driver. (She hit a moving train herself.)
I had a ticket for having out-of-date tags (for which my husband takes responsibility). I had a ticket for having a sticker from the county that I had moved from rather than the one I lived in. That’s it. No speeding tickets although I do try to drive right at the speed limit when road conditions are good. No wreckless driving. No driving under the influence. I have had fender benders. I think two were my fault. Someone else was driving my car when there was more extensive damage done. I was at a stop light once in the right lane waiting to turn right when I saw a huge truck coming up behind me quickly preparing to make a wide right turn from the left lane. I did not move. The truck went over my car but the man driving was given no ticket. I guess I shouldn’t have been there that day. (No, I wasn’t ticketed either.) Another time I was driving at night when I shouldn’t have been and ran into a concrete brace for a parking light in a parking lot. Just couldn’t see it. Only my car was involved and it was a little more than a fender bender.
I have compensated for my limited spatial judgment with super careful driving and parking. (And, BTW, I do advocate vision and reflex retesting for all seniors beginning at age 65.)
When I was in high school, a senior female won the driving rodeo. I was stunned that a mere girl could win. That is how much the idea that men were better drivers was inculcated into our heads.
It is relevant if used to point out that men will naturally outnumber women at the tail ends of the distribution.
For normal a to b driving I would imagine that gender is not a good predictor of how “good” or “safe” a person will be.
Actually, to be more specific. If you choose 100 “good” and “safe” drivers at random I’d imagine the gender ratio to reflect the ratio present in the total driving population.
If you looked at certain accident types I’d expect to see more men.
My own view of gender and drivers yields these generalizations (after about 55 years of observations): Men let their emotions determine a lot about how they drive, particularly when they get angry. They tailgate, they get in front of you and stop and start if they want to aggravate you, they speed, they cut you off, they jump start at lights, etc. I’ve rarely seen women act this way, and I believe these behaviors would likely lead to collisions or some other types of accidents. Women tend to be overly cautious or oblivious to the fact that they are, as drivers, part of a community. I used to think that was because females played fewer team sports and that notion was not inherent nor applicable to their orientation as drivers. That’s not as likely as it was. But overly cautious drivers are dangerous in their own ways (particularly in proximity to male drivers). But now that many people drive larger SUV’s, I find that I am most cautious around female SUV drivers who are on the phone, as their awareness of the mass of the vehicle, the size, the location, and their attention to the road tends to make the actual driving of the car secondary to whatever they are talking about. My caution has saved me from numerous potential collisions. I grant that confirmational bias may be at the root of my beliefs, but I know who to avoid and I’ve been accident free and have not caused any accidents since I started driving in 1958. Conclusion: both men and women can be terrible drivers for different reasons.