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Originally Posted by vineethvazhayil When I and my wife are in the car together (irrespective of who is driving), we try to guess who is driving a crazy driven car. Most of our guesses are the fair gender, and very often the guess is right. |
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Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom Well, quite.
But, although I stand firmly for recognition of equality, the last time I saw any such comment from insurers, the statement made was that they saw roughly the same number of accidents with male and female drivers, but there was a slight difference in the nature of the accidents.
I think that NinadJoshi's example is one of those correlation is not the same as causation things? It involves picking up children from school: picking up children from school is probably done by more mums than dads.
In my too-many decades, I can think of good and bad drivers. I can think of bad female drivers, but they are a small minority.
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I stand by what I've written, and by no means wish to impose my opinions upon anyone. My post is based on 15 years and over 500,000 miles of driving on the roads of a country which has more women drivers than men, officially. (As of 2010, more than 105.7 million women were licensed to drive in the U.S., compared with only 104.3 million men.) I have seen excellent women drivers and horrible male drivers. Almost got killed once by a road-raged Detroit Red Wings fan for not giving him his space fast enough as he merged in from a ramp at a triple digit speed, and at the same time have been flipped a bird at by a young woman or two for not 'speeding' fast enough too.
The school rant was just an example among many others. Just today morning at about 7:20 AM I made an 8 mile commute to meet with my client at work. The weather - 33 deg F, overcast, raining, sunrise half an hour away but the sun not expected to surface from behind the cloud cover all day any way. In short, fairly dark, rainy and the road surface a bit slippery. During the ~20 minute commute on the inner roads, among the hundreds of cars that went with and by me, I counted about 30 vehicles that did not have their lights on (I must get a life, seriously). The situation clearly warranted the common sense that drivers should make their presence visible by switching on their lights, to enhance overall safety for themselves and others on the road. Barring three gentlemen, the rest of these 30 odd 'stealth' drivers were ladies. (Disclaimer: There were many more vehicles on the road running without their headlights turned on, but who had their automatic daytime running secondary lights burning, hence excluded from this).
Insurance companies are free to publish their own studies, but I have my own experience based on my own time on the road. Insurance companies, by the way, will also admit that women are involved in more crashes per mile than men, but my point is there is a tangible difference in the driving traits between the sexes, and I have a bias for one based on my own experience. I can of course cite individual instances of great/responsible/conscientious drivers among the womenfolk I know directly or indirectly (wife, neighbor’s 89 year old mother, the kind lady who runs the Dairy Queen shop in my neighborhood, 90% of the school bus drivers in America, etc.), but if I broadly consider the million men and the million women who might have shared the road with me over the years, I have one clear verdict on which of the two sexes I’d rather be driving behind, or ahead of, or beside, or across from, on a road.
On a lighter note, behind each blissfully oblivious woman exercising her multitasking skills while on the wheel are 6 angry male drivers trying to understand why the big black minivan leading the caravan is doing 19 miles an hour in a 45 mph zone in the 7:30 morning rush hour on a single lane road. In that respect the insurance companies may not be much different than the WWF referees who miss the most important sly/cheat in the fight at the wrong moment, and award the verdict to the undeserving wrestler

Men (and we are a rather dumb lot sometimes, agreed) may be denting each other’s bumpers more than women but what the insurance companies probably fail to statistically capture is that the root cause of many an accident might well be 9 cars ahead, putting lipstick and talking to a friend about the latest sale at Kohl's or Macy's
