Driving Equity: The Importance of Gender-Inclusive Vehicle Testing and Design

When a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 73 percent more likely to be injured and 17 percent more likely to die than a man. One reason for these disparities in safety is that vehicles are designed around the male body. 

Source: The Guardian 

The consequences of car crashes are often more deadly for women than for men. Caroline Criado-Perez’s book “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” explores how gender bias and data gaps in data collection and use have adverse impacts on women. In chapter nine, she discusses how women are made more vulnerable to the impacts of traffic collisions through male-centric vehicle testing and design. In addition to describing her findings and the findings of others exploring this problem, this blog post highlights the potential for progress from the work that researcher Astrid Linder is leading. 

Safety Disparities:

Male-centric vehicle design occurs because cars are designed using crash-test dummies based on the average male. Crash-test dummies were first introduced in the 1950s and have generally been based around the fiftieth-percentile male. The most commonly used dummy is 5’9” and weighs 171 pounds, much taller and heavier than the average woman, and has male muscle-mass proportions and a male spinal column. Researchers began arguing for the inclusion of a fiftieth-percentile female in regulatory tests in the early 1980s, but it was not until 2011 that the United States started using a ‘female’ crash-test dummy, which was actually just a scaled-down male dummy. The introduction of this dummy significantly damaged cars’ consumer star ratings. The use of female dummies in a test revealed that a female passenger had a 20-40 percent risk of being killed or seriously injured in a front collision at 35 mph, with the average risk of death for that class of vehicle being 15 percent. 

Women are on average shorter than men, causing us to generally sit further forward than men when driving. Women adjust their position forward to see clearly over the dashboard and allow their legs to reach the pedals. The angle of the knees and hips of women with shorter legs reaching for the pedals also makes the legs more vulnerable to injury. Criado-Perez writes, “Women are ‘out of position’ drivers. And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions… Essentially, we’re doing it all wrong.” Women have more injuries to the spine and hips due to differences in hips, pelvises, and positioning towards the steering wheel and pedals and are more likely to suffer injuries to the neck, back, liver, and other limbs. 

Women are at higher risk in rear-end collisions as well. Women are up to three times more vulnerable to whiplash than men due to less muscle in our necks and upper torso. Car design amplifies this vulnerability, with research finding that modern seats are too firm to protect women against whiplash injuries, throwing women forward faster than men because the back of the seat does not give way for women’s on average lighter bodies. 

Pregnant women are disregarded in vehicle testing and design as well. Crashes are the number one cause of fetal death related to maternal trauma. Despite this, seatbelt design does not accommodate pregnant women, with 62 percent of third-trimester pregnant women not fitting the standard seat-belt design. A three-point seatbelt can ride up on women who carry low, which can triple or quadruple the force transmission to the abdomen and increase the risk of fetal injury. Many women wear seatbelts ‘improperly’ in an effort to accommodate their breasts, increasing risk of injury. This is especially concerning for pregnant women experiencing changes in their bodies and corresponding changes in positioning that diminish seat-belt efficacy. 

In her study of European Union crash-test requirements, Astrid Linder found that the five tests that cars must pass to be allowed on the market have no requirements for an anthropometrically correct female crash-test dummy, and four of these tests specify that a fiftieth-percentile male dummy should be used. One EU regulatory test requires a fifth-percentile female dummy to be used, and this dummy is approved for crash tests in the U.S. as well. Even then, this dummy is only tested in the passenger seat, so the impacts of sitting ‘out of position’ as a driver are not evaluated. This dummy is representative of the smallest 5% of adult women at 4’11” and 108 pounds. Additionally, the female dummy is just a scaled-down male dummy. As Criado-Perez writes, “women are not scaled-down men.” Women have lower bone density, differences in vertebrae spacing, different muscle-mass distribution, and other distinctions that impact injury rates in car crashes. When she looked at regulatory tests worldwide, Linder found that regulatory tests around the world are using the fiftieth-percentile male to represent the entire adult population. 

Source: Nordic Road and Transport Research 

Progress:

These disparities indicate the need for a redesign of cars using complete data, including the mandated use of anthropomorphically correct female dummies in car testing. Astrid Linder and her team of engineers have created the first accurate female crash dummy in 2022 and are using it to test women’s safety in low-severity rear-impact collisions. They designed the shape of the dummy based on data available from the University of Michigan’s database of body shapes. This dummy is shorter and lighter and has a bust, wider hips, narrower shoulders, and a different neck stiffness than male dummies. It is designed to test movement of the spine, neck, and shoulders and has realistic softness. According to Astrid Linder, “injury statistics clearly show that women are less protected than men. But the statistics are presented in hindsight, and at the moment we do not have the right tools to evaluate how new vehicles best prevent injuries for both parts of the adult population. Our model of a female crash test dummy can be used, together with its male counterpart, to evaluate the protection offered by car seats in preventing neck injuries so that both men and women are better protected in the future.” All data from the dummy’s development is freely available to everyone. Linder says that their prototype dummy demonstrates that the data to make an average female model exists. She hopes that their project will be used widely and that the safety of vehicles will be assessed equally for women and men. The first needed step is changes in requirements for car crash tests, and this would lead to additional data on the safety needs of women and improved safety innovations in vehicles. Linder was recently named in the 2025 Forbes Global 50 Over 50 list for her work advancing traffic safety for women through improved safety standards for car seatbelts and airbags and has been recognized globally with numerous other awards.