Women are far more likely to suffer serious injuries in a car crash.
The danger divide was first quantified in a 2011 study out of the University of Virginia, which found that for men and women who wore seatbelts, women were nearly 50 percent more likely to be seriously or fatally injured in a crash. And now it’s been confirmed by another paper from another University of Virginia research team, published this month, which found that the odds of serious injury or death for female car-crash victims is 73 percent higher than for males.
The latest study, which analyzed crashes involving more than 31,000 individuals between 1998 and 2015, reveals some good news, too: All riders are now more than half as likely to sustain serious injuries in newer models (those manufactured in 2009 and later), than in older cars.
But controlling for the car’s model year, and the passenger or driver’s age, height, weight, BMI, and proximity to the steering wheel, females continue to be in more vulnerable positions when involved in frontal impact collisions—even when they wear a seatbelt. The worst part, says Jason Forman, a principal scientist at UVA’s Center for Applied Biomechanics and one of the authors of the study, is that after nearly a decade of research highlighting this safety disparity, no one has yet found the definitive answer as to why.
“We obviously know a lot of ways that men and women are different bio-mechanically,” he says, in terms of both body size and shape. Female pelvises, for example, are generally wider and more shallow than males’; and fat is distributed unevenly around eac ..
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