Forget that old chestnut about women being better drivers than men. While males are more likely to be involved in fatal car accidents women have more accidents, according to research by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Dr Guohua Li, emergency medicine professor, and colleagues looked at 1990 crash statistics in the US. Their findings, published in the July issue of Epidemiology, show men were involved in 5.1 crashes per million miles driven compared to 5.7 crashes for women, even though men on average drove 74 per cent more miles per year than did women.
They found that teenage boys started off badly, with about 20 per cent more crashes per mile driven than teenage girls, but between the ages of 20 and 35 the risks levelled out and after 35 female drivers were at greater risk of a crash.
Previous assumptions about risk had been dominated by fatality statistics. Men are three times more likely than women to be killed in car crashes. The difference, the researchers say, was due to men being in more severe crashes and to doing more of the driving, which gave them more exposure to crashes.