SAN ANTONIO – Crash test dummies may have blank faces and androgynous features, but most represent a very specific type of the driver -- the average adult male. A study finds that gender bias poses a danger to female drivers.
“There are no crash test dummies that represent the average female in our country, and that’s despite the fact that women are nearly half of the drivers and are more than half of the population,” said David Friedman of Consumer Reports.
Results from safety crash tests have a direct impact on how cars are designed to make them safer. But if tests prioritize men, researchers say that can pose a safety risk to women.
A recent study from the University of Virginia found that a woman wearing a seat belt is 73% more likely to suffer serious injuries in a frontal crash than a man.
“This has been a clear problem since at least the early 1980s, when regulators actually first asked for there to be dummies starting to represent women,” Friedman said. “What they got was a scaled-down version of a male dummy that today is so small that it represents a young teenager.”
Automakers disagree that a change would help. The Auto Alliance, a U.S. automaker trade group, said they do not believe a female dummy would be useful because the current American female is closer in height and weight to the male dummy currently used in testing.
It’s not enough to simply scale down a male dummy, according to Consumer Reports.
“There are important physiological differences between men and women that make our bodies react differently during a crash,” said Emily Thomas, an injury biomechanics expert.
The government is evaluating a new set of dummies called THOR. They have been in development since the 1980s and may be used in European crash tests this year. THOR dummies are able to collect more data that current models. However, there are currently no plans for an average female THOR dummy.