Are Women Better Truck Drivers Than Men?

Despite being a slightly larger portion of the American population, ladies only constitute 5% of drivers within the trucking industry. Would tapping into this unused workforce help make the trucking industry safer?

That is what two researchers at Auburn University in Alabama wanted to find out when they examined over 22 million data points from 2010-2022.

Details

The data pointed to two major findings:

• Men were 13.2% more likely to have a major unsafe driving violation, such as driving 15 miles per hour above the speed limit.
• In the 12 years of study, men were 7.4% more likely to be cited for a major hours-of-service violation.
• From 2021-2022, the data was flipped and women were more likely to have hours-of-service violations.

So does this data mean that women should rule the road and men should step aside? Not exactly.

First, the researchers were more likely to justify violations committed by women than by men. For hours-of-service violations, for instance, they talked with Women in Trucking who handwaved the increase in latter years to “Women truck drivers face unique challenges when it comes to finding a safe and comfortable place to park for their mandated 10-hour rest”, as said by a female trucker when questioned.

Additionally, because 95% of truckers are male, it casts a wider net of outliers on both ends of the spectrum, increasing the numbers of both safe and unsafe drivers who happen to have a Y chromosome.

If the trucking industry had more women drivers from the general population pool, it is likely that the number of violations on average would increase, rather than decrease.

Conclusion

While it is undeniably true that trucking is a predominantly male sphere with 95% of those behind the wheel being men, to say women are inherently better at driving trucks would require a more proportionate sample size for women-trucking data (if the 22 million data points used by Auburn University researchers matches the demographics of truckers, it is 1.1 million versus 20.9 million).

We will need a more sizable percentage of women truckers before we can reach a fair conclusion for such a bold statement.

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