It's obviously a serious problem, but the article doesn't really offer much in the way of solutions? The most obvious one by implication is that we need to incentivize manufacturing and buying smaller vehicles (which would presumably be safer for men too, if proportionally less so). Inside the car, it seems like it'd call for the redesign of seat belts and some kind of 'variable height' setting or detection for airbags.
The article talks about solutions at three different levels, though perhaps more indirectly than you were looking for.
The end of the fourth paragraph and beginning of the fifth paragraph talk imply a solution: use crash test dummies that accurately simulate women's anatomy. (This is made a little more explicit in the ninth paragraph, as it mentions "requiring updated and more equitable dummy implementation tested in every seat".)
The seventh paragraph mentions that insufficient regulation of the auto industry has allowed them to build very large cars. It is thus implied that regulating the auto industry to produce smaller cars would help.
The eight paragraph talks about how the exclusion of women from automotive design decisions has lead them to ignore women as consumers (and crash victims). The implied solution is for auto companies to hire more women.
Sure, those are clear first steps, I guess I was wondering more about the kinds of changes representative testing would lead to after it was implemented.
Maybe the article could have included that if an automotive engineer had written it. But I think the article is perfectly fine for having included the steps that it did address.
Think about it this way. If you wrote an article about preventing the Toyota bug that resulted in uncontrolled acceleration, unless you were a former Toyota employee there's simply no way you can say "Toyota needs to change these specific lines of code" and you wouldn't even try. You might say "Toyota needs to adopt such-and-such code review practices" or "NHTSA needs to regulate the computer-controlled components of cars like this". Those are early, indirect steps that should force (or incentivize) the actual detailed improvements that you'd like to see happen.
>Unaccounted for are the varying bone densities, muscle structures, and abdominal and chest physiologies that differentiate women from a male dummy. For example, the neck musculature of an average woman contains far less column strength and muscle mass than a man’s, making women 22.1% more likely to suffer a head injury than men
It seems to me that there are two possible root causes (assuming the vehicle is constant, i.e. not from women driving smaller cars):
1. The crash test and vehicle designs are optimized around average male physiology
2. average female physiology would be more at-risk of injury and death regardless of crash test design/vehicle design
I'd like to know more about how much each of these factors contribute. The article does not make this clear.
"Industry data shows that part of the reason women are at greater risk than men is that we tend to drive smaller, lighter vehicles, while men gravitate toward bigger cars and trucks."
Ok. So that's simply choice, not negligence or bad design.
"For example, the neck musculature of an average woman contains far less column strength and muscle mass than a man’s, making women 22.1% more likely to suffer a head injury than men."
IE, men are physically stronger in some ways. If they make the vehicles safer to compensate, men will still have lower injury rates.
"With a president who himself knows the pain of losing female loved ones to a car crash, and our nation’s first female vice president, who herself is at greater risk every day she buckles into a car, if not now, when?"
Good lord. I've always thought Fast Company was a trash magazine, but geez.
To the extent they should test cars against male and female morphologies in order to ensure they aren't optimizing safety for one gender over the other, great. Chest seatbelts shouldn't garrote smaller women. That's reasonable. But the big problem is just different behavioral and innate physical differences, and that isn't going to respond to new legislation.
Oh, and just because I was curious, here are some stats:
Females are more likely to get injured then males in similar accidents. Still, nearly twice as many males are killed/injured in car crashes than females. Cars are dangerous any way you look at it.
> IE, men are physically stronger in some ways. If they make the vehicles safer to compensate, men will still have lower injury rates.
This is not a competition.
Fewer women dying in crashes will be a good thing. No one is trying to upend the status quo.
> But the big problem is just different behavioral and innate physical differences,
No, the big problem is an entire industry caring too little about women’s safety in crashes.
> and that isn't going to respond to new legislation.
To what is it going to respond, then?
> Still, nearly twice as many males are killed/injured in car crashes than females.
Let me quote from the link you posted:
> Men typically drive more miles than women and are more likely to engage in risky driving practices, including not using safety belts, driving while impaired by alcohol, and speeding.
Kudos to the authors for linking to the NHTSA source materials. The executive summary and the initial sections are way less click-baity than the article, and yet more interesting. Figure 6 and the table above seems to indicate that the fatality gap has significantly shrunk over time due to air bags and seatbealts. And the data on xvii seems to say that "Curtain+torso" airbags might almost eliminate the gap (but the error bars are huge).
8 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] threadThe end of the fourth paragraph and beginning of the fifth paragraph talk imply a solution: use crash test dummies that accurately simulate women's anatomy. (This is made a little more explicit in the ninth paragraph, as it mentions "requiring updated and more equitable dummy implementation tested in every seat".)
The seventh paragraph mentions that insufficient regulation of the auto industry has allowed them to build very large cars. It is thus implied that regulating the auto industry to produce smaller cars would help.
The eight paragraph talks about how the exclusion of women from automotive design decisions has lead them to ignore women as consumers (and crash victims). The implied solution is for auto companies to hire more women.
Think about it this way. If you wrote an article about preventing the Toyota bug that resulted in uncontrolled acceleration, unless you were a former Toyota employee there's simply no way you can say "Toyota needs to change these specific lines of code" and you wouldn't even try. You might say "Toyota needs to adopt such-and-such code review practices" or "NHTSA needs to regulate the computer-controlled components of cars like this". Those are early, indirect steps that should force (or incentivize) the actual detailed improvements that you'd like to see happen.
It seems to me that there are two possible root causes (assuming the vehicle is constant, i.e. not from women driving smaller cars):
1. The crash test and vehicle designs are optimized around average male physiology 2. average female physiology would be more at-risk of injury and death regardless of crash test design/vehicle design
I'd like to know more about how much each of these factors contribute. The article does not make this clear.
"Industry data shows that part of the reason women are at greater risk than men is that we tend to drive smaller, lighter vehicles, while men gravitate toward bigger cars and trucks."
Ok. So that's simply choice, not negligence or bad design.
"For example, the neck musculature of an average woman contains far less column strength and muscle mass than a man’s, making women 22.1% more likely to suffer a head injury than men."
IE, men are physically stronger in some ways. If they make the vehicles safer to compensate, men will still have lower injury rates.
"With a president who himself knows the pain of losing female loved ones to a car crash, and our nation’s first female vice president, who herself is at greater risk every day she buckles into a car, if not now, when?"
Good lord. I've always thought Fast Company was a trash magazine, but geez.
To the extent they should test cars against male and female morphologies in order to ensure they aren't optimizing safety for one gender over the other, great. Chest seatbelts shouldn't garrote smaller women. That's reasonable. But the big problem is just different behavioral and innate physical differences, and that isn't going to respond to new legislation.
Oh, and just because I was curious, here are some stats:
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/males....
Females are more likely to get injured then males in similar accidents. Still, nearly twice as many males are killed/injured in car crashes than females. Cars are dangerous any way you look at it.
This is not a competition. Fewer women dying in crashes will be a good thing. No one is trying to upend the status quo.
> But the big problem is just different behavioral and innate physical differences,
No, the big problem is an entire industry caring too little about women’s safety in crashes.
> and that isn't going to respond to new legislation.
To what is it going to respond, then?
> Still, nearly twice as many males are killed/injured in car crashes than females.
Let me quote from the link you posted:
> Men typically drive more miles than women and are more likely to engage in risky driving practices, including not using safety belts, driving while impaired by alcohol, and speeding.