A Look at Gender Stereotypes and Car Accidents

A gender stereotype is basically a set of beliefs or expectations about how men and women are supposed to behave.

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Now, when it comes to driving, you’d think cars don’t care about gender, right?

A steering wheel doesn’t know if you’re male or female. But people definitely care, and their beliefs about what driving “should” look like for men and women are powerful.

Researchers have found that kids start to develop different ideas about male and female drivers from as young as 10 years old. These ideas stick and grow as kids get older.

Some even start asking questions like, “Do men or women get in more car accidents?" a question often tied to the stereotypes they’ve already picked up.

By the time they hit their teens, they already carry solid, gender-based images of how men and women drive.

Here’s how the stereotype goes:

• Men are seen as confident, fast, decisive, maybe even a bit aggressive.
• Women are often viewed as hesitant, unsure, nervous, and lacking driving skills.

That might sound like an opinion, but it’s not. It’s what 599 kids aged 10 to 16 actually said when asked to freely associate words with male and female drivers.

And the boys stuck mostly to the stereotype. The girls, on the other hand, had a bit of a twist: they were more likely to defend women as drivers, showing something called an in-group serving bias (basically saying "our group isn't bad" to protect their identity).

Why Stereotypes Are a Big Deal

It would be just talk if it didn’t affect real-world behavior. But it does. In almost every country where data exists, men get into more car accidents than women, a lot more actually; especially young men.

Take France, for example. Among people aged 15 to 59, 70 to 80% of all traffic deaths are men. And that’s not just France. In most Western countries, men are 2 to 3 times more likely to die in a traffic crash than women.

ArrayIt’s not because men are physically built to crash more. It’s about behavior. And that behavior links right back to stereotypes.

How Stereotypes Mess With Real Driving Behavior

So what happens when people actually believe these stereotypes?

One study tested this with women on a driving simulator. They were reminded of the stereotype that “women are bad drivers” right before driving, and as a result, they drove worse. Not because they lacked skill, but because the stereotype made them nervous, distracted, and unsure. That’s called stereotype threat, and it’s a real psychological effect.

Furthermore, when people think men take more risks, they expect that. So when men drive aggressively, it’s kind of brushed off. But if a woman makes a mistake, it’s seen as confirmation of the stereotype—“See? Women can’t drive.”

This creates a trap: women are judged harder, and men are excused more easily.

What the Research Found About How People See Drivers

A group of researchers wanted to find out what exactly people think when they see a man or a woman behind the wheel.

They didn’t just guess. They studied online forums where men and women talk about driving, focus groups with pedestrians, and police officers. They also had interviews with both male and female drivers and took comments from professional drivers too.

What they found was clear and a little brutal.

Female drivers were described as:

• Incompetent
• Nervous
• Lacking confidence
• Unpredictable
• Egocentric
• Mentally rigid
• “Not cut out” for driving

Men even added insults like “low intelligence” or “too emotional” to the mix.

Male drivers, on the other hand, were seen as:

• Confident
• Practical
• Skilled

But they were also seen as:

• Rule-breakers
• Impulsive
• Aggressive
• Unsafe at times

Yet despite these negatives, the male stereotype was still seen as the “default” driver, the model to compare everyone else to.

Conclusion

Men are dying more in traffic accidents. Women are being underestimated or unfairly judged. Kids are learning these patterns before they even get behind the wheel.

If we want roads to be safer, we have to stop pretending that these stereotypes are harmless. They’re not. They shape how people drive, how they learn to drive, how they react in traffic, and even how they see themselves.

And that’s something we can change, but only if we start looking straight at the bias and not away from it.