How Can Smart Men Be Such Crash Test Dummies?
4 mins read

How Can Smart Men Be Such Crash Test Dummies?

Big news for 2012: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has decided, after three decades, to include FEMALE models in the simulated crash tests that gauge automobile safety.

This is a wonderful development.  Simply fantastic.  But somehow, I think the engineers at the Department of Transportation might have figured out awhile ago that women drive cars too (outside of Saudi Arabia, at least), and that women and children are quite frequently passengers in cars as well.  It is also not a big mental stretch for safety engineers to figure out that women’s (and children’s) bodies are dramatically different than the average 5 foot, 9 inch 172 pound male dummy prototype.

Our legs and arms are shorter, so we sit closer to the dashboard and steering wheel, both lethal weapons during frontal crashes.  Our heads – the most important part of one’s body to protect in a crash — are positioned at lower heights vis-à-vis windows, headrests, the steering wheel, and airbags.  We get whiplash more easily. Our bones are smaller.  Our muscles weaker.

So who are the real crash test “dummies”? The people who have run these critical safety tests for the past three decades – in the process, neglecting the safety of women and children in automobiles.  Close to 80% of the auto industry is male; only one manufacturer (Volvo) has ever had a car designed by women. Did the men running the NHTSA and working in the automobile industry just never think about women’s safety and the fact that our body size makes us vulnerable in ways distinct from men?  A giant “oops, honey – it just never occurred to me that this was important to you”?

Or  — even worse — did they not care?

It’s not as if this doesn’t matter.  Women make up 25% of all driver fatalities, and 50% of all passenger deaths.  Women have a 47% higher chance of serious injuries than men in comparable collisions, with both genders wearing seatbelts.  More pregnant women die in car accidents than from birthing complications.

And let’s not even talk about kids and cars, except to say that motor vehicle injuries are the leading cause of death among children, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Safety guidelines – most notably the well-known 5-Star Safety Ratings — are established because of the NHTSA data.  Consumers use the information to decide which cars to buy to protect themselves and their families.  NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), has become a resource for traffic safety research not only in the United States, but throughout the world.

What this has meant is that women, who buy 65% of new cars in the U.S. and spend $200 billion on automobiles annually, have unknowingly relied on safety data that does not protect us or our children.  This biased data has endangered thousands of U.S. citizens over the past 30 years.  Perhaps the data has indirectly caused injury and death because people bought specific cars that they assumed were safer – not knowing that “safer” in the automotive industry meant “safer only for men.”

How can all of the NHTSA safety data, paid for by men and women’s tax dollars over the years, pertain only to men?  I understand male-centric blunders like building public restrooms without taking into account that women take longer to pee than men.  I grew up in the times when boy’s sports programs got far more money and attention than girls did.  And I’m disgusted, but not surprised, that conservative factions who claim ObamaCare interferes with natural procreation by reimbursing birth control costs haven’t said peep about Viagra being covered.  I guess I can even comprehend certain male biases that led to medical research dollars getting funneled, disproportionately, into discovering remedies for the most common male diseases while female afflictions were short-changed.

But only building male crash test dummies – for 30 years — without coming to grips with their own deadly biases? Can NHTSA personnel and automotive industry executives really be that self-centered, that blind, that unthinking, that selfish, that…dumb?

It gives the term “road rage” a whole new meaning.

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