When “mankind” is used as a generalisation for everyone, one particular group typically gets forgotten – “womenkind”. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the gender data gap, bringing you such travesties as having no space suits for women, CPR dummies having no breasts and body armour not being effective for women since it’s designed for a male body. When society focuses on data collection based on a male experience it results in design centred around this single perspective. The list of where this shows up in the world goes on, but this post focuses on car safety and how it isn’t really designed with women’s measurements in mind.
Women are bad drivers right? We sit too close to the steering wheel, because our legs need to be able to reach the pedals that were designed for men’s naturally longer legs. We need to raise the seat height, that was designed with male proportions in mind, so we can see over the dash and steering wheel. We get distracted when our voice command system, that was designed to register a male voice, doesn’t recognise our voice. And when we’re in a car crash, we’re 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die because cars and car safety features are designed and tested only for the male body.
How we’re different
Men and women have physical differences that could be crucial to know for car safety. We’re different in so many ways:
- Our voices have different registers for voice recognition
- Generally being smaller and lighter so, we’re flung forward faster
- Different muscle mass distribution
- Different fat distribution
- Less muscle on our necks and upper torso, which make us more vulnerable to whiplash (by up to three times)
- Lower bone density
- Differences in vertebrae spacing and spinal alignment
- Female torso geometry – shape and form
- Muscle and ligament strength
- Female dynamic responses to trauma
- Smaller pelvis, wider hips and shorter legs
- Our menstrual cycle causes joint stiffness and changes in range of motion
Our driving position is “wrong”
The standard seating position that manufacturers test collision impacts against is not the position that women typically drive in. Women tend to sit closer to the steering wheel, because they’re typically shorter than the standard seating position – we need to be able to reach the pedals. We also tend to elevate the seat, or sit more upright to see over the steering wheel and dash. But this difference in positioning puts women at greater risk for leg and internal injury in frontal collisions.
(Consumer Reports)
To add insult to injury this position difference isn’t really accounted for in car design or more importantly safety testing. Instead, it’s just termed “out-of-position” and suggests the issue is with the smaller than “normal” driver (normal being 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighing 176 pounds), rather than understanding the actual driver and designing and testing for that.
Car seat designs aren’t as effective
When it comes to rear-end collisions, modern car seats designed to absorb impact and protect a male driver from whiplash, aren’t as effective for women since we have differences in our neck and upper torso muscle.
Women are up to three times more vulnerable for whiplash because the back of the seats don’t account for our on average lighter bodies and fling us forward faster.
Voice recognition ignores us
In theory, voice recognition software is supposed to decrease distractions while driving, if it works. While pretty much every voice assistant is a default women’s voice, (apparently because we have calmer voices, I’m not sold but aaaanyway) voice recognition software has been proven to be less effective at picking up a female voice.
According to Rachael Tatman, a data scientist and PhD linguistics graduate from the University of Washington, in a The Register article, this is an inherent technical problem because females generally have higher pitched voices, that also sound quieter and more “breathy”. This isn’t just happening with women, if you aren’t a white man with an American accent, you’re going to have some issues with voice commands.
According to a 2019 Harvard Business Review article, one of these reasons might be down to databases full of white male voices and a lack of diversity. AI systems can only learn from data it sees frequently and if it’s only trained on one type of data, it won’t be so great at recognising anything different from that.
As a native English speaker from Ireland and someone who had to take a spoken English proficiency test to immigrate to Canada and did not get 100%, I can definitely attest to voice recognition software not picking up on a female non-American accented voice. And I’m not the only Irish woman impacted by this, some have failed spoken English tests completely.
Crash-test dummies don’t include women
In the seventy years that crash test dummies have been in use, we still don’t have an anatomically representative female crash test dummy. If and when a “female” crash test dummy is used, it’s just a smaller version of a male dummy and could also represent a 12 year old. Because we’re just smaller men children? Oh and they only put it in the passenger seat. Because women don’t drive? What?
When the crash test dummy was first introduced in the 1950s, they were designed on the 50th-percentile male using a male spinal column and muscle-mass proportions. It took another sixty-ish years, until 2011, before the US started using a female crash test dummy. And by female, I mean a smaller version of the male dummy. And she’s not tested as a driver for frontal collisions (here she’s a passenger), she’s only tested as a driver for side collisions. Or not at all.
In the EU, there’s only one regulatory test requiring a 5th-percentile female dummy, but this dummy is only tested in the passenger seat and again, it’s a scaled down version of a male dummy.
According to the Guardian, some consumer tests are more strict. The EuroNCAP claims to use male and female dummies in frontal collision tests and base their female dummies on anthropometric data, “where data is available”. Where data is not available, they sometimes use the smaller male dummies.
You’re shit outta luck if you’re a pregnant woman. A pregnant crash test dummy was developed in 1996 but it’s not mandated to test with it in the US or the EU.
Seat belts don’t account for breasts or babies
Seat belts are designed to protect the driver from being ejected, but even if you’re wearing your seatbelt, if you’re a woman you’re still more at risk to be seriously injured in a crash than a man.
Seat belts have been required in Canada since 1976 and in Ireland since 2006 but we still don’t have data on exactly how seat belts work with a woman’s body.
According to Carolyn Roberts, PhD student at the University of Virginia, how a three-point seat belt sits on top of breasts and a women’s more complicated chest geometry isn’t clear, since a single study on how breast tissue affects seat belt placement hasn’t ever been conducted.
Even worse again if you’re one of the 62% of third-trimester pregnant women who don’t fit current seat belts designs. Despite the fact that car crashes are the leading cause of foetal death related in maternal trauma, we still don’t have a seat belt to fit pregnant women.
How do we make cars more safe for women?
Women represent almost 50% of all drivers and 80% control the car purchasing decision. And yet our safety isn’t considered when it comes to designing and testing cars. If the safety of our lives isn’t enough, it’s also the second biggest purchase most people make, next to a house. And apparently we control a lot of that decision. So notice to all the car manufacturers reading this blog, I’m going to choose the one least likely to kill me. So if you could design safe cars for women too, that’d be great. Thanks.
Response from industry
The response to this data gap has been varied across manufacturers and regulators. One solution for our voice recognition issue from Tom Schalk, VP of voice technology for ATX Group (a supplier for auto makers), is for women to simply change the way they speak, “many issues with women’s voices could be fixed if female drivers were willing to sit through lengthy training… Women could be taught to speak louder, and direct their voices towards the microphone”. Why didn’t we think of that sooner? Why doesn’t everyone just yell like a white American man and get over it?
Some industry experts say developing new dummies and tests would take too much time, is too expensive or just unnecessary (excuse me?). David Friedman, vice president of advocacy at Consumer Reports, believes the problem is also in car companies designing just to the safety test, stressing the importance of a more holistic approach to safety design.
In fairness, some manufacturers are focusing on safety for women. Good old forever safety conscious Volvo. Since they were the seat belt inventors back in 1962, I guess it makes sense. They’ve been collecting data on women under their E.V.A Initiative (equal vehicles for everyone) and just like how they released the seat belt design, they plan to release this data to other manufacturers too.
Response from safety advocates
According to Emily Thomas, Ph.D., automotive safety engineer at Consumer Reports’ Auto Test Center, “The reality of progress in automotive safety is that it heavily relies on regulation. Unless the federal motor vehicle safety standards require dynamic crash testing with average-sized female crash dummies in multiple seating positions, driver side included, the dummy industry and automakers won’t make that leap themselves.”
“The reality of progress in automotive safety is that it heavily relies on regulation. Unless the federal motor vehicle safety standards require dynamic crash testing with average-sized female crash dummies in multiple seating positions, driver side included, the dummy industry and automakers won’t make that leap themselves.”
Emily Thomas, Ph.D., automotive safety engineer,
Consumer Reports’ Auto Test Center
Jason Foreman, a principal scientist with the Center for Applied Biomechanics, solidifies the requirement for more data with his belief that, “we don’t have enough information on the biomechanics of female occupants, or an understanding of the specific factors that create a higher risk for females. Until we understand the fundamental biomechanical factors that contribute to increased risk for females, we’ll be limited in our ability to close the risk gap,”
Astrid Linder, research director of traffic safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, is working on a prototype to accurately represent women’s bodies. She also argues that technically this is already a legal requirement under Article 8 of the Treaty of Functioning of the European Union – “In all its activities, the Union shall aim to eliminate inequalities, and to promote equality, between men and women.” So the EU is just deciding to overlook equality between drivers right now?
Between using more diverse and representative crash test dummies, actually regulating for this and car manufacturers designing for holistic safety, there’s plenty of room for improvement when it comes to car safety for women. And it’s about time we start focusing more attention on it, I mean, it’s only our lives at risk here.
The Bailey Rating
Disclaimer: While I make reference to women and female bodies throughout this post, references made are not meant to be exclusionary or suggest you need be a cis gendered women to experience these problems. This post is intended to serve as a log of my rambling opinions and tracker of information gathered on a topic. I aim to present accurate, well researched information, citing facts presented to the best of my ability. However, some information may prove to be inaccurate and I encourage you to do your own research on the topic. I’m always open to hearing new information or perspectives on topics posted and aim to keep this post accurate with updated information once discovered or presented to me. Feel free to comment below if you have anything to add 🙂
Header image by Julia Kuzenkov from Pexels
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