differenceblog, posts by tag: automobiles - LiveJournal

A report released last week by BMW is sparking several conversations -- surprisingly, the report itself doesn't appear to be available online. "The Secret Life of Cars and What They Reveal About Us" is based on survey responses by 1,000 U.K. drivers. The report was authored by British researchers Iain MacRury (University of East London) and Peter Marsh (Social Issues Research Centre).

According to news reports, BMW's research finds that:

• Men consider their cars an extension of themselves, whereas women see it as a separate entity The Electric New Paper (SG)
• Men alone get out of a car in seconds, whereas families with children take several minutes to unpack (no word on how quick women are on their own) The Scotsman (UK)
• Women are more likely to be rude and less likely to apologize while driving RAC Foundation (UK)
• Men are more likely to drive one-handed Telegraph (UK)
• Among one-handed drivers, women were more likely to place their spare hand in their lap, whereas men placed it on the gear shift Daily Mail (UK)

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One phrase that keeps being repeated in all these "news" reports (and admittedly, it's pretty soft news) is something along the lines of "researchers confirmed what ___ have long suspected" -- with the blank being women if the reporter focused on a male stereotype, and vice versa. Only the RAC Foundation blog expressed surprise at results, in discussing women's rudeness behind the wheel. Another issue I have with the stories is that only two of the sources linked above mentioned that the study was commissioned by BMW.

The Local (3/1/07) reports that Carina Bladh (Linköping, Sweden) was outraged to discover that her car insurance premium jumped up when her official sex changed from female to male. After her complaint, the insurer decided to lower her premium back to its prior level. According to Esurance's website (2007), in the U.S., gender only figures into insurance rates for drivers under 25, where men pay more.

As discussed in "A Driven Man" (11/27/06), men have been involved in more accidents than women over the history of automobile driving. J.J. Arnett's 2002 review repeats the frequently-stated suggestion that because testosterone is linked to aggression, and aggressive driving is linked to accidents, testosterone must be a contributing factor to frequency of traffic accidents. However, I've been unable to find any studies that actually connect testosterone levels to differences in driving behavior.

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I used to joke that I didn't transition until I was 25 because I didn't want my car insurance to go up. I've driven so much less since my transition that it's very hard for me to judge if my driving habits have changed. Just prior to transition, I had a job that required a 40 minute commute by car each way. Since transition, my only job has been easily accessible on public transportation, so I only drive about once a week, if that. I am not at all convinced that aggressive driving and other measures of aggression are similar enough to draw the kinds of conclusions that seem to be common in this research. It seems that aggressive driving is far more focused on the self vs. a system (e.g. "I need to get ahead of this traffic") whereas other types of aggression are more focused on the self vs. a specific other (e.g. "This guy spilled his drink on me").

Researchers at Purdue University (2007) report that age and gender may have significant effects on the severity of injuries sustained in a car crash. The research, published in The Journal of Safety Research (Islam & Mannering, 2006) was based on Indiana traffic data from 1999. The authors suggest that vehicles designed to adapt to the specific drivers could lessen the severity of injuries. For example, rollover accidents are especially dangerous for older women (over 65). Middle-aged men (25-64) were more likely to have a fatality falling asleep at the wheel, while middle-aged women were more likely to have a fatality on a curvy road. Ulfarsson and Mannering (2004) compared gender outcomes in SUV-related crashes, and found that striking a guardrail was a major risk for female drivers, while male drivers had an increased risk of fatality in SUV-related collisions on starting.

Lee Evans (2006) points out that males are more likely than females to die in traffic accidents starting in infancy. In terms of non-physical impact of an automobile accident, Stallard et al (2004) found that among children (7-18 years), girls were more likely than boys to develop PTSD following a traffic accident.

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There's a tradition among women in my family of flipping VW vans. This "tradition" gets mentioned at family gatherings every couple of years. At least 3 women in my family have done it. I was in the van for one of them -- in a car seat, because I was all of 4 years old. Other accidents in my family have been almost entirely overshadowed by this "pattern" -- including my biggest accident as driver, a head-on collision.

An article in the UK's Times(11/25/06) claims that "there will be fewer differences between the sexes in the future." The article is part of a series ("Gender Fender", 11/22/06; "Speed Camera expose gender gap", 11/22/06) inspired by Corbett and Caramlau (2006), whose study of 1995 vs. 2003 attitudes towards speed cameras found substantial gender differences, leading the authors to conclude that "it may not always be appropriate to 'drivers' en masse...[when] stating what drivers feel." The Times' assertion that gender differences are decreasing seems to be based on the study's finding that both sexes are finding ways to manipulate the speed camera system (such as slowing down as approaching a camera, and speeding up afterward).

Despite the Times series frequent assertions that women are stereotyped as poor drivers, Glendon et al (1996) found that most drivers felt young males were the least competent drivers, and most likely to get in an accident, confirming similar results found by Matthews and Moran (1986). A statistical review by Evans (2006) suggests that the difference between male and female accident rates has remained fairly steady despite changes in society, which Evans calls support for a biological cause.

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I've been lucky enough not to trip over the Times before, and with any luck, I won't find anything worth covering there again. The oh-so-precious "women driver" jokes permeated all the articles they published on this topic, and finding the sources for their claims was less than intuitive. I suppose it's useful for me to be reminded that sexism is still rampant in huge swathes of society. Then again, I conveniently forget how much I used to indulge in that sort of humor, and I'm probably "forgetting" doing it more recently. I used to wear a man's hat and sunglasses when I drove, in the hope that other driver's wouldn't see me at the wheel and classify me as a "woman driver." I've never been confident about my driving ability, and I didn't want to contribute to the stereotype. Of course, my motives for not wanting to be seen as a woman were probably more complicated, but I wasn't aware of it at the time.