Researchers who studied thousands of traffic accidents over a 20-year period came up with a finding that even they found surprising: Female drivers are far more likely to run into a car driven by another woman than a man.
Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute, who is lead author of the study published in the Traffic Injury Prevention journal, said in a telephone interview that he and his colleague, Brandon Schoettle, wanted to determine if there is a gender interaction component in traffic accidents. They did indeed find it, he said, but they didn’t expect the difference between men and women drivers to be nearly as great as the research indicates.