STUDY: Women More Likely To Be Trapped In Vehicle After Crash

A new study has found that women are almost twice as likely as men to be trapped in a vehicle after a crash.

Researchers from the UK looked at the injury data of 70,027 trauma patients in the country between January 2012 and December 2019. While the data showed that men were more likely to get themselves into serious crashes, women were more likely to get trapped, due to injuries of the vertebrae, spinal cord and pelvis which likely render them unable to retrieve themselves from the vehicle. There is a higher rate of head and chest injury in male patients.

For many years, vehicles were and continue to be designed for the male frame. The world’s most widely used crash test dummy is the Hybrid III 50th Percentile Male Crash Test Dummy, which represents a 78 kilogrammes and 5-foot 9-inches tall person or the “average” man.

Some automakers use a scaled down version of the Hybrid III to represent female passengers (and this dummy is usually placed in the passenger—not the driver—seat during crash tests) but because standards were set in the seventies, the female dummy is the equivalent of a 12-year-old kid today (our parents were relatively malnourished).

But we know better now that boys are made of puppy dog tails and girls of everything nice, and that the internal male and female structures are quite different—enough to make a difference in car crashes. One of the reason women are more prone to pelvic injuries in car accidents is simply because women have wider hips and are therefore more prone to injury from a side impact.

Females are also more likely to be seated closer to the steering wheel (shorter legs) and thus more likely to be trapped from the intrusion of the dashboard and steering wheel after a frontal crash. The study did also point out that they are more worried of injuring themselves further and do not attempt to self-extricate.

The results highlight the outcome of not considering gender differences when designing vehicle safety. It is certainly worrying to this (female) writer that when automakers boast about their long list of safety features, whether they will apply to me when it matters most.