Got in a discussion about safe driving with a friend of mine where he stated that women of having more accidents and blamed them for being the actual cause for the male drivers to have accidents.
Reasons mentioned for this are :
[ul]Women drive slowly
[li]Women have a lower skill level in driving, proof of that argument was that there’s very few women in professional racing / NASCAR[/li][li]Fighter pilots are male[/li][/ul]
Counter argument:
[ul]Women insurance premium is lower than men, and insurances only care about the risk
[li]Men take more risks, e.g. overtake more dangerously[/li][li]Speeding[/li][li]Driving under the influence[/li][/ul]
The reason, that men overtake dangerously was ignored, since apparently the reason for this is that they must, because women drive to slow.
However, the speeds that where given by him to be offensive (women speeds) and to slow - are the speeds that I personally also drive as a male.
The insurance argument was thrown out, because men have these accidents - but women are the actual cause.
Here are some cites to support my line or argument, but they could be argued away of being of more of a journalistic opinion based nature. Cite Cite Cite
So, after all this I need some gender based statistical help of the cause of accidents, to either prove me or him wrong.
PS: Not interested in “feeling” or “opinion” - only cold hard facts
Too lazy to dig up where I read this, but men have a lower number of accidents per mile driven, but usually get charged more for insurance because they drive a lot more.
Seems to me he’s the one that should be providing facts to back up his feeling. Namely that women drive slower than men and that women’s speed is below the acceptable safe margins and men’s within the acceptable safe margins.
That’s the central point of his argument and as long as he gets to make it without backing it up I don’t see how you can out-fact him.
Not that he’s likely to change his mind regardless. In his mind his conclusion is unassailable by facts.
I just noticed his math is wrong, but the difference is larger (men having less accidents per mile) with the correct math. I am too lazy to type up my calculations.
Driver insurance rates are set based on actual risk, that is, historical records of who actually gets into accidents. Women have lower rates (except when otherwise required due to law) because they get into fewer accidents. If men want to get into fewer accidents maybe they should drive more like women.
Women not somehow forcing men to have accidents. That’s bizarrely paranoid.
Meaning, women are more likely to drive the posted speed limit? You know, the speed you’re actually supposed to be going?
If you’re driving on a normal road like a NASCAR driver then you need to get off the road because in ordinary day-to-day driving that’s unsafe. For that matter, it’s not exactly safe for NASCAR drivers on a track, either, look at all the spectacular wrecks you see in racing.
I actually know a former professional race car driver (Took 3rd place at the Indianapolis 500 one year). He’d probably piss the hell out of your buddy on the regular road because he does stuff like obey the speed limit - maybe because he’s been in enough wrecks already and understands that Main Street isn’t a racetrack.
Tell your buddy we have female fighter pilots now.
Also, as a pilot myself, airplanes and cars are two different things, I disagree that’s a valid comparison.
^ This.
^ This. Women are less likely to suffer from testosterone poisoning, so they have many fewer “road rage” accidents and situations where they’re trying to prove something or other rather than actually drive the car.
By the way - this is also why women pilots have fewer airplane accidents.
If men are speeding then yes, that will contribute to them having more accidents, especially in bad weather. Granted, we refer to “Mother Nature” but in actuality the weather doesn’t have a gender and isn’t forcing men to speed.
This is also probably related to the cultural tendency for men to do the driving when there is both a man and a woman in a car/truck. They may both be smashed, but the DUI gets attached to the actual driver. Ditto for situations when the drunk/drugged man insists on driving even through the woman is less under the influence than he is.
Complete bullshit. No one HAS to pass anyone. You might want to pass them really, really badly but you aren’t FORCED to do this. That’s just a bad driver blaming someone else for his bad driving.
The speed limit is there for a reason and that reason is NOT “to piss off male drivers” or “to piss off your buddy”. He needs to STFD (slow the fuck down), maybe try decaf.
Bullshit. That’s more blaming someone other than the driver for bad driving. If you’re driving YOU are in charge of the vehicle, those other people are not forcing you to speed or pass or do dumb shit. That’s on the driver.
Not cites, just pointing out the thinking errors in your buddy’s bias.
I have read that women get into more fender-benders, while men get into more “serious” accidents. If this is true, this may be evidence women tend to be less attentive when driving, while men are more apt to engage in risky behaviors while driving.
This fairly recent article cites a recent change where sometimes middle aged women pay more than middle aged men. The statement in there “State insurance commissioners should insist that auto insurers explain why they usually charge middle-aged and older women higher rates than men” is a little puzzling. One wonders why they shouldn’t be equally insistent insurers explain why if it’s the other way around.
Odds are in both cases the insurance co’s simply charge rates based on what they expect their payouts to be for particular drivers, based on the best info they have. The political system can decide what info is ‘fair’ to take into account. A few states prohibit using sex of driver as input to car ins rates. A lot of people complain when eg. credit scores are used, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t a useful predictor.
But most general references say it is the other way around, women pay less for car insurance, no doubt true for younger drivers. But especially where the differences are small, as they generally are for people past 30, you can’t use them to directly measure who is ‘safer’. They are also a function of miles driven, whereas ‘safe’ is generally thought of per mile. And also how expensive the car is (if it’s a comparison of what people pay on average, not a comparison of rates for the exact same situation with a male v. female driver), which says nothing directly about how safely the person drives.
Anecdotally I don’t know anyone who disagrees with the general observation that a car weaving wildly through traffic at way over the speed limit is almost always driven by a male. Among drivers who aren’t assholishly aggressive like that, there’s a lot less anecdotal agreement whether men or women (or different races or ethnicities) are better or worse drivers.
One metric is number of accidents per miles driven in natural behavior.
That doesn’t necessarily indicate the skill of a driver. I would not find it hard to believe that young males are actually the most skilled drivers on the road. Their problem is that they overestimate their skill and have a propensity to do stupid things.
If you asked grandma to weave in and out of traffic and drive as fast as her grandson, she might not make it a few miles before she crashes, whereas he may go several thousand miles. However, grandma driving as she wants to drive can go 100,000 miles without an accident. He may be a more skilled driver, but she is a safer driver.
Speaking broadly, women take fewer risks, men have better spacial awareness. Who is a better driver depends on the situation. If you’re in a situation where risk is rewarded or expected, say at a speedway, then you want to go with the person with better spacial awareness. If you’re in a situation where risk is punished, say driving to the grocery store then you want to go with the person who takes fewer risks.
I (and most insurance companies) say that more costly accidents are caused by taking unnecessary risks rather than misjudging the situation, so in most situations, women as a whole get the nod so they get cheaper insurance. Of course, the male counterpoint to that is that if both men and women are behaving the same, then women are worse drivers and that’s probably true. A woman is probably more likely to merge into a car in their blindspot as an example, but that more than balances out the fact that men are more likely to cut off that car in the first place because they are impatient about waiting behind a truck in the slow lane.
I wonder if the reason the data shows that men drive a lot more miles than women is that the large majority of big rig drivers are men. Because otherwise I cannot account for it.
As for the pathetic easily-disproven testosterone-fueled arguments that women driving safely and responsibly cause men to have all these accidents for which they are then unfairly blamed, I’ve been hearing this for ten thousand years. Women are always blamed for causing men to behave badly. She made me hit her, she made me drink, she made me lose control, she made me swerve around her because she was driving the speed limit, and then she made me weave in and out of traffic while cars swerved into the ditch and then she made me broadside the highway patrol guy. All her fault!
Cite? I don’t notice that women drive any more slowly than men. Not saying it’s not true, but would like statistics.
2 and 3. Fighter pilots and NASCAR drivers are mostly male for cultural reasons. E.g., American women weren’t allowed to be fighter pilots until recently. Women tend not to want to be fighter pilots and NASCAR drivers.
Because we are still a sexist enough society than when a couple drives, the man does the driving more often than not?
Edit: When my girlfriend and I drive somewhere together I normally drive because we normally take my car as it is bigger and more comfortable. If we drive a long distance we share the driving.
In general classing every difference in male and female roles and behavior as ‘sexism’ is highly debatable IMO. Nobody knows all the reasons for differences in human behavior and outcomes by group, sex or other.
That said, there’s no necessary logical connection between men being more frequent drivers and safer or ‘better’ drivers (there’s no reason to use both terms if they are synonymous, and it’s two different questions if they’re not). Men drive more miles alone than women drive alone, for example for their jobs (though not just or particularly truck drivers) or just travel more alone. Answer why that is is also not as simple as ‘sexism’ except for some unrealistic idea any gender role or difference in frequency of interest in various things between the sexes is ‘sexism’. Anyway it isn’t just that men drive more when a male/female couple is in the car.
