Baby, Maybe Don’t Drive My Car
Image by adamr.stone via Flickr
When men and women get in the car, men tend to get in the driver’s seat. But should they? While stereotypes about who’s a better or worse driver may sound (or even be) sexist, the fact remains that men and women do exhibit different behavioral traits — there’s no reason to think they might not drive in very different ways. Even if these ways are an artifact of Western culture as opposed to inherent gender differences.
Thus, Freakonomics blog has been doing a many-part series on the question.
In today’s post, we get closer to some answers. It turns out, women get in more accidents per mile driven (despite the fact that men get in more accidents total — they do that because they drive many more miles).
However… when it comes to severity of accidents, men get in many more fatal accidents than women. And so, the debate continues.
I tend to think women probably are generally safer drivers than men. (Still, I always drive. Because, dammit, I’m the man. And because my wife, while she technically has her license, grew up in New York City and thus doesn’t really know how to drive, as far as I’m concerned.)
One question all this leaves me with: Is women’s higher rate of accidents per mile itself caused by men tending to take the wheel in relationships? Driving skill has to be significantly related to practice, and it looks like women on the whole get a lot less time behind the wheel, leaving their driving skills rustier than men’s.
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Ugh. Ryan, You’re going to get in trouble that way.
Statistics are good for indicating areas of further investigation, for validating practices, and for detection of problems. They’re not good for determining causality.
With the right dataset, I don’t think it would be too difficult to find out if fewer hours driven makes up for any differences between male and female accident rates.
As for why men are in more fatal accidents than women — presumably this has to do with higher rates of aggressive driving (maybe even drunk driving?). But I’m not sure how you’d sort it out from accident statistics. It’s probably possible, I’m just not very familiar with what data’s available.
In response to another comment. See in context »It would be interesting to take a look at commute distances for men v. women. My first thought in reading your comment about experience was that it can’t be all that different – I drive to work, my wife drives to work – even though I drive on the weekends (when we’re together) it can’t add up to all that much more experience… However, if my wife’s commute was a mile and a half and mine was forty miles, she’d have less experience even if she got behind the wheel whenever we traveled together.
Of course, data would need to be included for those that fall into the ’stay at home parent’ category, as not having a work commute doesn’t mean you don’t do any weekday driving…