Map of Inequalities

Another gender data gap : car design.

When you’re sitting down, you’re still swaying. ‘If you’re sitting on a stool then you’re swaying around your hips,’ explains Stofcegen. ‘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 to use it,’ he adds. And I feel like one of those cartoon light bulbs has just gone off in my head. What if the headrest is at the wrong height, at the wrong angle, and the wrong shape to accommodate your body? Could women’s increased propensity to motion sickness in cars be exacerbated by cars being designed around the male body.

The available research on whether car headrests have been designed to account for the female body is seemingly non-existent. This gap is hardly unexpected though: car design has a long and ignominious history of ignoring women.

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Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in car accidents. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity.4She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.

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Women tend to sit further forward than men when driving. This is because 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, however, the ‘standard seating position’. Women are ‘out of position’ drivers. And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions. The angle of our knees and hips as our shorter legs reach for the pedals also makes our legs more vulnerable. Essentially, we’re doing it all wrong.

Women are also at higher risk in rear-end collisions. Women have less muscle on our necks and upper torso than men, which make us more vulnerable to whiplash (by up to three times), and car design has amplified this vulnerability. Swedish research has shown that modern seats are too firm to protect women against whiplash injuries: the seats throw women forward faster than men because the back of the seat doesn’t give way for women’s on average lighter bodies. The reason this has been allowed to happen is very simple: cars have been designed using car-crash test dummies based on the ‘average’ male.

Crash-test dummies were first introduced in the 1950s, and for decades they were based around the fiftieth percentile male. The most commonly used dummy is 1.77 cm tall and weighs 76 kg (significantly taller and heavier than an average woman), and the dummy also has male muscle- mass proportions and a male spinal column. In the early 1980s, researchers argued for the inclusion of a fiftieth percentile female in regulatory tests, but this advice was ignored. It wasn’t until 2011 that the US started using

a female crash-test dummy, although, as we’ll see, just how ‘female’ these dummies are is questionable.

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In the EU, there are five tests a car must pass before being allowed on the market: one safety- belt test, two frontal-collision tests, and two lateral-collision tests. In no test is an anthropometrically correct female crash-test dummy required.

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There is one EU regulatory test that requires what is called a fifth- percentile female dummy, which is meant to represent the female population. Only 5% of women will be shorter than this dummy. But there are a number of data gaps. For a start, this dummy is only tested in the passenger seat, so we have no data at all for how a female driver would be affected – something of an issue you would think, given women’s ‘out of position’ driving position. And secondly, this female dummy is not really female. It is just a scaled-down male dummy.

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But women are not scaled-down men. We have different muscle-mass distribution. We have lower bone density. There are sex differences in vertebrae spacing. As Stoffregen has noted, even our body sway is different. And these differences are all crucial when it comes to injury rates in car crashes. The situation is even worse for pregnant women. Although a pregnant crash-test dummy was created back in 1996, testing with it is still not government-mandated either in the US or in the EU. In fact, even though car crashes are the number-one cause of foetal death related to maternal trauma, we haven’t even yet developed a seat belt that works for pregnant women. Research from 2004 suggests that pregnant women should use the standard seat belt, but 62% of third-trimester pregnant women don’t fit the standard seat-belt design.

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A 2015 report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is excitingly headlined ‘Improved vehicle designs bring down death rates’ – which sounds great. Perhaps this is the result of the new legislation? Unlikely. Buried in the report is the following telltale line: ‘The rates include only driver deaths because the presence of passengers is unknown.’ This is a huge gender data gap. When men and women are in a car together, the man is most likely to be driving. So not collecting data on passengers more or less translates as not collecting data on women.

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Article 8 of the legally binding Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union reads, ‘In all its activities, the Union shall aim to eliminate

inequalities, and to promote equality, between men and women.’ Clearly, women being 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash is one hell of an inequality to be overlooking.