It’s A Man’s World In The Crash Test Facility
Notice the design of the chest, biceps, neck and jaw…
Take a look at your typical crash dummy – the sort they use in the ANCAP and similar tests (see the photo, sourced from ANCAP). Notice anything about them and what they’ve got in common? Ten points (or should that be five stars?) for you if you noticed that a crash test dummy tends to look like a guy. I don’t know if you can really refer to a crash test dummy as a male but it (he?) is definitely masculine.
Yes, indeed. Skipping the whole thing about gender identity and all that, there are only two basic human skeleton and tissue types: the male sort and the female sort. And, in case you haven’t been paying attention, they aren’t the same. Women (in general) have wider pelvises, narrower chins, a higher proportion of body fat, smaller hands and feet and thinner necks than men. They’ve also got their centre of gravity in a different place. When guys get a bit chubbier, they put it on their tummies; when women do the same, it goes on the butt and thighs. Men have flat chests and even my A-cup sisters have boobs. Women are, on average, shorter (yes, we’re talking typical and average here and I know perfectly well that there are tall women and short men). Male bones are denser and have a higher proportion of muscle mass. Women have a larger lumbar lordosis (the curve in the lower spine that lumbar support in the driver’s seat is supposed to fit snugly into), which means that their pelvis tilts at a slightly different angle, which affects the walk. In fact, high heels are designed to increase that lumbar lordosis, the tilt and the swaying walk. And the list goes on.
Unfortunately, in spite of the key role of my heroine Bertha Benz in getting the whole horseless carriage thing started, car designers have used “standard” or “typical” human figures when designing cars. Unfortunately, as most car designers up until now have been guys, guess what they see as being “standard” or “typical”: the others sitting with them around the drawing board, who are all guys.
Surely, I’m not the only woman driver who has sat there fiddling with the lumbar support control and wondered why the heck it doesn’t come out any further because it’s not quite getting into the right place, and why the seat angle is never exactly right. We tend to start playing around with cushions at this point. As for the problems that crop up when you’re a female driver in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, trying to negotiate a seat belt around the baby bump and the set of Pamela Andersons you’ve picked up… don’t even get me started! Apparently, women sit in the “wrong” driving position when they’re behind the wheel.
However, the safety systems that have been put in place by car designers have been developed and tested with the standard crash test dummy. Which is based on the average male. The smaller size, the different shape, the different centre of gravity, the different tissue density and all the rest of it means that a female body does not behave like a male body during a collision. OK, they did try during the 1980s to introduce a feminine crash test dummy, but this (1) had the same proportions as the male ones but just scaled down rather than having curves and (2) is usually put in the passenger seat during crash tests.
Can we just pause and think about that for a second? When they do crash tests, they mostly put the female dummy in the passenger seat. This was pointed out just last year by a pair of (female) Swedish road safety researchers*. Crash tests, in general, assume that women don’t drive. These tests weren’t being carried out in Saudi Arabia, for goodness sake! What were they thinking?
A truth that’s even more inconvenient than Al Gore’s is that women have a much higher rate of being injured in a car crash than men. Given the same speed and impact type, women get hurt worse. The simple reason for this is because the cars’ safety features have been engineered and tested with the average male body in mind.
To take just one example, think of whiplash. A lot of new cars have active head restraints that are designed to cradle the head and neck to prevent whiplash. However, you can guess what these have been tested on most of the time. In fact, when the NHTSA started using “female” crash dummies (which they started doing in 2003), they used them for the side impact tests… which aren’t quite such a problem for whiplash, given the vectors of the forces involved. Now, no woman is Barbie but we do have thinner necks than guys. In fact, if you’re an artist or cartoonist, one of the quickest ways to make a head and shoulders to look masculine or feminine is to adjust the proportions of the neck.
Women’s necks don’t have the muscle and sinew there that guys do, so our heads and necks don’t behave the same way during the sort of crash that is most likely to lead to whiplash. Add in the fact that women aren’t “sitting right” in the driver’s seat because we’ve got different pelvises, plus the fact that seatbelts are hard to get right if you’ve got anything on your chest bigger than a B cup, which is the case for most women. Heck, we all know that fitted T-shirts and jeans for men and women are cut differently, for goodness sake! Given all these differences, and it’s no wonder that women’s rate of getting whiplash is much, much higher than that of guys.
I’m going to be charitable here and put forward the notion that the guys designing cars and doing the crash tests are nice guys at heart rather than a bunch of sexist pigs. Perhaps the idea of using a crash test dummy that looks more like a real woman jars with their inner knights in shining armour and a plan to put even a replica of a damsel fitted with lots of sensors so you can see just how much distress she gets into is upsetting. If this is the case, well, that’s sweet of you guys, but you’re actually not doing us any favours.
However, change is afoot and more and more women are getting into car design and the safety side of things, although anything like a 50–50 proportion in the workplace is a long way off. Yet another (female) vehicle safety researcher from Sweden has looked at the stats and is developing a proper female crash test dummy with female proportions. Known as EvaRID, this dummy is designed with the whiplash issue in mind. You can hear Dr. Astrid Linder introduce this dummy in her TEDx talk (in English, don’t panic!):
As you can expect with those safety-minded Swedes, Volvo is getting on board with the E.V.A. initiative (which stands for Equal Vehicles for All as well as cleverly echoing the name of the dummy, which is the Swedish for Eve, the first woman). The senior technical specialist at Volvo Cars Safety Centre, Dr. Lotta Jakobsson (yes, another Swedish woman), is doing her bit by collecting real world crash data and heading a design team to make cars just as safe for women as they are for men. In fact, Volvo’s existing WHIPS design was tested on the EvaRID dummy as well as on the male one (the name of the most recent one is Thor, continuing the Nordic theme), and Volvo’s getting right behind the initiative. This makes me want to run out an buy a new Volvo right away. However, as we saw many years ago with the invention of seatbelts, where Volvo goes, others are soon to follow.
The fact that the designers, modellers, engineers, researchers and analysts focusing on the gender differences happen to be mostly women is also noticeable, which is also an argument for encouraging just as many girls as guys to get into the field of engineering. We don’t need to go to the extremes of having a vehicle that is designed solely to fit a woman’s body – although it sure would be a best-seller – but making sure that we don’t forget 50% of the population (and let’s not even get started on ethnic differences in body size and type) by ensuring that some of said 50% knows their stuff with engineering will make better cars for all humans.
And, gals, you’ve still got no excuse for not wearing a seatbelt even if sits badly on your chest, so buckle up!
* Linder, A., & Svedberg, W. (2018). Occupant safety assessment in European regulatory tests : review of occupant models, gaps and suggestion for bridging any gaps. Presented at the 18th International Conference Road Safety on Five Continents (RS5C 2018), Jeju Island, South Korea, May 16-18, 2018, Linköping. Retrieved from http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vti:diva-12886
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