I am 17% more likely to die in a car crash, your mother is 47% more likely to be seriously injured and your sister, auntie or grandmother are 71% more likely to experience moderate injury during a crash. Why? Where do these numbers root from, surely it's not the design we can hold accountable. Today we will be disassembling these statistics to untangle the issues using the book 'Invisible Women' by Caroline Criado Perez.
Differences in Autonomy
We all know that albeit both being humans, men and women are built differently but to what extent does it cause disadvantages within the safety design of a car? There was an interesting point made in chapter 9 of Invisible Women where the author spoke to Tom Stoffregen, a kinesiology professor at the University of Minnesota, discussing the imbalances found in male and female bodies.
"If you're sitting on a stool then you're swaying on your hips. If your chair has a back, then your head is swaying on your neck. The only way to really get rid of that is to have a headrest, and use it!"
An interesting finding was that the quality of stabilisation for women in a car seat is significantly lower. Why? Women tend to sit further forward than men when driving as we are, on average, shorter. Our legs need to be closer to reach the pedals and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the dashboard, this is not classified as the 'standard seating position'. The angle of our knees and hips as our shorter legs reach for the pedals also makes our legs more vulnerable. In addition, women have less muscle on their necks and upper torso than men, which makes us three times more vulnerable to whiplash. Swedish research has shown that modern seats are too firm to protect women against whiplash injuries: the seats throw women faster than men because the back of the seat doesn't take into account women's average lighter bodies.
So women, through no fault of their own, are seen as 'out of position' drivers. It came to me as no wonder that our deviation from the 'norm' means we are at a greater risk of injury during a collision. The reason this has all been allowed to happen is that we live in a world where vehicle crash tests are only legally required to use dummies shaped like the average man. Keep your eyes peeled, we will touch on safety dummies in the next blog post!
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