So, women are better drivers than men
It turns out (again) that conventional wisdom does not hold true. Male chauvinists (including yours truly) have always maintained that men are superior drivers than women. Kat Zeman of insure.com reports that, statistically, women are safer drivers than men.
The statistics show that male drivers are three times more likely than female drivers to be cited for reckless driving, DUIs, and seat-belt violations and nearly 1.5 times likely to be cited for speeding, failure to yield, and stop-sign and signal violations. Also, 0.6% of male crashes were fatal as opposed to 0.31% for females. As a side bar, female DUIs increased 14.3% from 1998 to 2007 while males DUIs decreased 19.7% in the same period.
It would be interesting to see how the population of drivers affects this analysis. It turns out that the number of male and female drivers are roughly the same (103.6 million male to 104.7 million female in 2008).
Not satisfied with this conclusion, I decided to dig a little deeper. I surmised that while men may be involved in more fatal accidents than women, it may be possible that men drive more miles than women and may just have a higher accident rate because they drive more. It turns out that this true however this only proves the argument. IIHS reports that men have 2.5 fatalities per 100,000 miles driven as opposed to 1.7 for women.
So, there you have it, women are indeed better drivers than men.
Links:
MSN — “Worse drivers: Males or females?”
