A new study developed by the University of Michigan found that car accidents are mostly caused by women. Researchers studied thousands of traffic accidents over a 20-year time span. The results are surprising: female drivers are far more likely to run into a car driven by another woman than a man.
The study is bound to add fuel to the man vs. women fire. Lead author Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute said he and his colleague, Brandon Schoettle, wanted to determine if there was a gender interaction component in traffic accidents. In fact, Sivak called the results “astounding.” The team examined police reports of two-vehicle traffic accidents across the country from 1988 to 2007.
They focused in on cases where the drivers of both vehicles could “potentially” determine the gender of the other driver in the moments before the crash. The accidents occurred during “personal travel” and since men drive 60% of the time compared to a woman’s 40%, the researchers’ theorized men would be involved in more accidents.
The "expected" percentage of accidents in which both drivers were men should be around 36%, but the chances that a woman would run into another woman was expected to be less than 16%, because women drive less than men.
Crashes involving two female drivers were "overrepresented" in five out of six different crash scenarios: Variations on crossing another vehicle's path, side-swiping, turning in front of another vehicle, and head on. But here's the bizarre part - when both vehicles were driven by a female, the crashes exceeded the expected frequency by at least 50 percent in two scenarios, and more than 25 percent in three others.
At least one other study discredited the idea that men are better drivers than women are. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University revealed that female drivers were involved in more crashes then men, but the difference was not substantial – 5.1 crashes per million miles driven for men, compared to 5.7 crashes for women.
