Changing patterns in women´s driving

Abstract

Until relatively recently, the task of driving a vehicle was almost exclusively one for men. Only in the last few decades have women taken en masse to driving. This review analyses the driving behaviour of men and women and attempts to establish whether women are better or worse drivers than men. It is paradoxical that according to the stereotype, women are less skilful at carrying out manoeuvres such as parking. However, it is said that women are more cautious at the wheel. The statistics show that men tend to be over-represented in traffic accidents although women are said to get distracted more easily, for example by looking at themselves in mirrors. This study discusses to what extent women's driving patterns differ from those of men, how they have changed in recent decades and what the future predicts, taking into account the accident data of these groups. We contrast the popular belief, which portrays women as bad drivers, with data compiled from the literature on evolutionary and constitutional differences and the differing vulnerability of the two genders. We analyse whether differences exist in the frequency of driving between men and women, evaluating the characteristics, types of journey, accident data and, among other issues, styles of driving: caution vs. aggression at the wheel.

Road Safety as a Public Health Problem: Case of Ecuador in the Period 2000–2019

“…In Ecuador, the number of males with light and serious injuries was double that of females between 2000 and 2013, as shown in Table 6. The chi-square analysis of the relationship between the variables of sex of the victims involved in traffic accidents and injury severity shows that the variables are independent, as concluded by other studies [23][24][25][26][27]59]. A recent work concerning gender in road safety has applied clustering analysis to the pattern identification in road crashes with two passenger cars in Spain [39].…”

“…Table 8 shows that the number of males who die in traffic accidents is higher than that of females; approximately six males and two females die per day in traffic accidents in Ecuador. Other research [20,21] shows that sex is a factor that influences traffic accidents in several countries [23,26,27].…”

“…Research on sex differences generally concludes that the crash rate or risk of being actively involved in a road traffic crash (especially fatal crashes) remains higher for men [24,25,[27][28][29][30][31], although the crash rate for both sexes is influenced by age in the first place, with higher rates for young [24,25,30,32,33] and older [30,32] drivers.…”

Driver Pattern Identification in Road Crashes in Spain

“…In the past few decades, the presence of women on the road has increased notably compared to men drivers [1], [2], [3], [4], and [5]. Therefore, the number of female drivers involved in vehicle collisions has also increased in this period [2], [4], and [5].…”

“…Regarding gender, the majority of works have found significant differences between both genders in aspects such as crash rates, injury severity, the type of offence committed and the perception of driving skills. In general, male drivers are more involved in vehicle collisions (especially fatal ones) than females [1], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], and [9].…”