![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/crash-test-dummy-300x121.jpg\")
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It may have come to your notice that not all car drivers are men. For most of us, this isn\u2019t much of a staggering revelation, especially if you are a woman. Or if you were ever driven places by your mother. Or taught your daughter to drive. Or asked your wife or girlfriend to share the driving with you on a long-haul trip interstate. Or if\u2026 well, you get the picture. However, it seems as if car manufacturers, especially those responsible for the passive safety features, haven\u2019t quite cottoned onto this yet, as a whole.\u00a0 You\u2019d think that Bertha Benz had never taken her husband\u2019s prototype horseless carriage out for a long drive to demonstrate to the world that this new invention was easy to use.<\/p>\n
The road safety analysts who collect facts on these sorts of things found, when they separated out the data for men and the data for women, found out that women are 73% more likely to be injured in a vehicle crash than men and 17% more likely to die in one. This isn\u2019t because they\u2019re crashing at a higher rate, either. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety<\/a> in the US, men still crash more and are more likely to do silly things like not wear seatbelts, drive too fast and drive drunk. However, if they do get into identical crashes, a man is more likely to survive it than a woman.<\/p>\n One has to ask why, given that most car manufacturers pride themselves on how good their safety features are. After all, they do all those crash tests with dummies, don\u2019t they? Surely these should make cars safer for both men and women?<\/p>\n Well, yes. Lots of passive safety features such as airbags have become standard on just about every new vehicle thanks to these tests. But there\u2019s a wee problem with these tests, as pointed out by investigator and social commentator Caroline Criado-Perez in her book Invisible Women<\/em><\/a>. Ms Criado-Perez dug around a bit and found out a few things about the standard crash test dummies used in most tests by most manufacturers. In these tests, they tend to use three main ones for the frontal crash tests: one 95th<\/sup> percentile male (in other words, a dummy representing a really big dude who\u2019s bigger than 95% of other guys), a 50th<\/sup> percentile male (an average guy) and a 5th<\/sup> percentile female dummy (a teeny lady who\u2019s shorter than 95% of the population). In other words, tests are carried out on twice as many male dummies as they are on female dummies. That\u2019s a wee bit of a problem to begin with.<\/p>\n However, it gets worse. According to Ms Criado-Perez, during those frontal crash tests, the female dummy isn\u2019t even tested in the driver\u2019s seat \u2013 she goes into the front passenger seat. This makes you wonder what century these designers are living in. Surely, given that they\u2019re putting all these electronic assistance gadgets, they know that this is the 21st<\/sup> century and that women drive cars, don\u2019t they? The good news here is that in Australia, the ANCAP tests do put that 5th<\/sup> percentile female dummy in the driver\u2019s seat during the frontal tests \u2013 good for them.<\/p>\n However, there\u2019s one wee problem with that female dummy. OK, she\u2019s smaller than the male ones and she\u2019s got boobs, but when it comes to actual anatomy, that dummy doesn\u2019t actually represent real female biology. What the designers did was to simply take the male dummy, scale it down and put boobs on it. The trouble is that nature doesn\u2019t work like that. There are differences between male and female skeletons \u2013 that\u2019s forensics 101 (yes, literally; it\u2019s part of the basic undergraduate anatomy course). Take necks for example.\u00a0 If a man and a woman have the same sized head, the woman will have thinner neck vertebrae and a thinner neck.\u00a0 Now look down a bit to the other end of the spine, and look at the pelvis. The male pelvis is narrower and has a heap of different angles, which means that a guy\u2019s legs are also straighter \u2013 and that\u2019s just the start. The differences between male and female pelvises are as different as the soft bits found in and on the pelvis (yes, the bits you\u2019re thinking of). And the list goes on: men have longer ribcages and denser long bones as well.<\/p>\n In short, using a smaller version of a male dummy doesn\u2019t actually represent a female body. Women are being misgendered by crash test dummies, in effect.<\/p>\n Would you be surprised to learn that in one recent study on sex differences between injuries from car crashes, women were more likely to have injuries to their pelvises and spines \u2013 the places where female bodies are most different from male bodies? Those whiplash-protecting headrests do something, but they\u2019re better at protecting male necks than female necks \u2013 because they\u2019ve been tested on what are essentially male dummies.<\/p>\n However, this isn\u2019t an excuse for men to hog the driver\u2019s seat.\u00a0 Volvo is one car manufacturer who has cottoned onto the fact that women have been driving since Bertha Benz took a road trip through the Schwartzwald, and they\u2019re starting to work out how they can make cars safer for 100% of drivers.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, a more anthropomorphically correct female dummy has been invented, known as the THOR-5F<\/a>. \u00a0The THOR-5F isn\u2019t just a scaled-down male dummy but has been built to actually represent that dainty 5th<\/sup> percentile female, pelvis, neck and all. This dummy even has a whole heap of sensors in the abdomen and the dummy looks like she\u2019s in the second trimester of pregnancy. \u00a0A crash test mummy, if you like. Here\u2019s hoping that ANCAP and the other safety testing authorities will insist that this dummy or other dummies based on real women must be used in crash tests.<\/p>\n In the meantime, keep on driving safely and always wear your seatbelt (even if arranging it around your boobs is awkward).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It may have come to your notice that not all car drivers are men. For most of us, this isn\u2019t much of a staggering revelation, especially if you are a woman. Or if you were ever driven places by your mother. Or taught your daughter to drive. Or asked your wife or girlfriend to share […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5120,86,5958,57,65,3071,5121],"tags":[7265,7261,5542,5934,7264,6393,7263,7262],"class_list":["post-13976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automotive-design","category-blog","category-humour","category-manufacturer-news","category-safety-2","category-technical","category-women-and-cars","tag-anatomy","tag-crash-statistics","tag-crash-test","tag-crash-test-dummies","tag-crash-test-dummy","tag-crash-testing","tag-men-in-crashes","tag-women-in-crashes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13978,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13976\/revisions\/13978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}