Fishing in the Bay

From today’s Age: It’s official: women are better drivers than blokes, at least according to one survey.Research by insurer AAMI, released today, shows men are more likely to drive dangerously and have been in more crashes.

A telephone survey of 2384 licensed drivers last year and analysis of AAMI claims data show 84 per cent of men have been in a crash compared with 77 per cent of women. Our claims data shows that men’s crashes tend to be more serious than women’s. They are more likely to be involved in head-on collisions, roll-overs and loss-of-control crashes, as well as crashes involving pedestrians, cyclists and animals.

AAMI spokesman Geoff Hughes said. Women are more likely to be involved in relatively minor crashes such as reversing into stationary objects. The findings are supported by the injuries men receive. Men are three times more likely than women to be killed on Australian roads and the trend is worsening.

Cheetham Consulting Group psychologist John Cheetham told AAMI he was unsurprised by the findings, since

Self-awareness and social responsibility tends to be higher among women, whereas men are biologically more aggressive, more impatient and more willing to push the boundaries. Women use more parts of their brain to undertake tasks and furthermore, differences in men’s and women’s neurological processing can advantage women. However, the female brain is not as good at spatial relationships, so it is not surprising that they strike stationery objects more frequently than men.

We certainly wouldn’t want to make any crude generalisations about gender now, would we? But more to the point - did anyone bother to adjust the accident rates for the number of hours spent driving? Or the proportion of time spent in supermarket carparks compared to the SE freeway?

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