Women Are More Likely To Be Injured In Car Crashes Despite Wearing A Seat Belt As Compared To Men: Study
The recent death of Cyrus Mistry has caused a lot of debates and conversations about the state of our roads and driving safety. Pooja Bhatt has also commented on the same recently. And while accidents like these aren’t inherently sexist and can happen to anyone, did you know that studies say that women are more likely to get injured in car crashes than men?
According to an analysis from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), there are other factors besides the lack of a crash test dummy that accurately depicts an average female body which makes women more likely to be hurt in accidents than males. These factors include the fact that men typically drive heavier cars and are more likely to cause front-to-rear collisions. A female passenger or driver who is wearing a seat belt is 17% more likely than a male to be killed in a crash, according to studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and a female occupant’s odds of suffering injuries in a frontal collision are 73% higher than a male occupant’s odds.
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Lawmakers have urged the NHTSA to address the problems that could cause disparities in car injuries and fatalities after CR and others brought attention to this imbalance. One theory is that because there aren’t any crash test dummies that accurately depict the average female form, automakers end up designing cars to protect the so-called 50th percentile male, who is now represented by a 171-pound, 5-foot-9-inch dummy that’s used in most crash tests. The IIHS thoroughly studied crash data and discovered that the likelihood of injury can be increased by both the kinds of vehicles that women are more likely to operate and the fact that male drivers are more likely to cause collisions.
For instance, more than 20% of crashes involving men took occurred in pickups, compared to less than 5% of crashes involving women, despite the fact that men and women had roughly equal proportions of crashes in minivans and SUVs. Men tended to crash in heavier vehicles within the vehicle classes, which can provide better protection in a collision, according to the IIHS. This is particularly troubling because many popular pickup trucks lack basic advanced safety features like automated emergency braking (AEB), which can assist prevent or lessen the severity of the kind of front-to-rear collisions that are more likely to cause injuries to women. Vehicles with AEB, front collision warning (FCW), and lane-departure warning (LDW) can lower bodily injury insurance claims by 16%, according to a previous study by the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), a subsidiary of IIHS.
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The IIHS researchers discovered that other disparities diminished when vehicle type, vehicle size, and crash type were taken into account. Women were twice as likely as men to sustain moderate injuries and slightly more likely to sustain severe injuries in a crash, particularly when it came to leg injuries. Additional research revealed that, in some circumstances, vehicles with “Good” ratings in the IIHS moderate-overlap front and side crash tests reduced the likelihood of some injuries for women more than they did for males. The study looked at single- and two-vehicle front accidents that occurred between 1998 and 2015 and required towing because the front airbag had deployed.
The findings also point to the need for a greater study to identify how to avoid the specific injuries to which women are more vulnerable, as well as more effort to increase the crashworthiness of smaller vehicles. Depending on the type of injury, the type of vehicle, and the sort of incident, a woman may be less safe in a car with a Good crash test rating than she would be in a car with a Marginal or Poor rating.
