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Seeing beyond pink and blue to decode the mysteries of men and women.
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Announcer
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from Howstuffworks.com.
Molly
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. This is Molly.
Cristen
And I’m Cristen.
Molly
Cristen, here’s a question we get a lot from our listeners, are women really worse drivers than men?
Cristen
Ah, yes, the ultimate gender stereotype.
Molly
It is a gender stereotype. I bet a few of you, when you saw the title of today’s podcast in your iTunes queue were sorta, like, “Really? Really, Molly and Cristen, you’re going to go there? Isn’t it a little too basic?”
Cristen
You’re going to get behind the wheel of this stereotype?
Molly
Oh, Cristen, you staring early with the puns.
Cristen
I’m trying. I’m trying to get things cranked up here, Molly. I’ll stop.
Molly
Well, we are going to go back because, once we started to research it, as usual there was pretty interesting stuff behind this stereotype. Not quite as basic as we thought and my fondest hope is that this podcast will prove both my father and my brothers wrong about my driving abilities.
Cristen
Molly, do you get some flack from the men in your family?
Molly
I do, and I think it’s unnecessary. I’m not saying I’m a perfect driver, but I’m not saying that they are better drivers than I am.
Cristen
Yeah.
Molly
I will say that I prefer to drive without my dad in the car. He just grips the -
Cristen
Oh, the door handle?
Molly
The door handle, yeah, really tightly.
Cristen
And how is that not supposed to affect you? That’s going to make you feel worse, it’s going to affect your performance, and they’re just undermining you before you even start.
Molly
Uh-huh. Anytime you even start to put on the brakes, grip. The tight grip.
Cristen
Well, Molly, let’s get down to brass tacks -
Molly
All right.
Cristen
- and answer this question. So let’s start out with a study from January 2007. This comes from MSNBC.com. There was a guy named David Gerard from Carnegie Mellon University who coauthored a study on road risk. He found that male drivers have a 77 percent higher risk of dying in a car accident than women, based on miles driven.
Molly
He admitted, and I found this a pretty telling quote in this article, that he lets his wife drive. Based on the research he had done in putting together this database of all these traffic incidents, he lets his wife drive. She’s the safest person to have behind the wheel according to his research.