Male drivers are almost three times more likely than women to be involved in road collisions that kill or seriously injure pedestrians in Great Britain, a gap that has widened over the past decade.
A Guardian analysis of government road accident and journey data shows that in 2020 and the first half of 2021, 4,363 male drivers were involved in collisions that seriously injured or killed pedestrians, compared with 1,473 female drivers.
Including trips by car, van, motorbike and in other private vehicles, this equates to 2.8 serious collisions – those involving a pedestrian being injured or killed – for every 10m journeys by men, compared with 1.04 for women.
The figures – which exclude cases where the sex of the driver was not known or recorded – show that men have been more likely to injure or kill pedestrians, going as far back as at least 2002 when comparable data on the number of journeys began being recorded.
Although the overall number and rate of collisions has fallen over the decade, with Covid lockdowns resulting in an all-time low – the disparity between the proportion involving men and women has widened over the same period.
In 2010, a male driver was 2.2 times as likely to kill or injure a pedestrian as a woman driver. In the first half of 2021, that had risen to 2.8 times as likely. When men are behind the wheel, pedestrians are also more likely to be killed or seriously injured than receive a minor injury, compared with when a woman is driving.
About 33% of crashes involving pedestrians resulted in serious or fatal injuries when a man was behind the wheel, compared with 28% for women. Part of the disparity could be down to the different vehicles used while driving for work. One in four pedestrian deaths on roads in 2021 was due to being hit by a van, truck or bus.
As well as being more likely to hit pedestrians, men are more likely to die in road collisions. Of people (including drivers) who died in all road accidents in 2021, 78% were male, according to the latest Department for Transport report.
A survey for the road safety charity Brake in 2020 found men were three times more likely to drive above the speed limit than women. Nearly 30% of male drivers admitted having driven above 100mph – more than three times the number of women (9%) who admitted it.
Mary Williams, the chief executive of Brake, said: “We’ve found in previous research that males are more likely to risk-take, for example by speeding. We know that across the piece, offending in society that involves violent behaviours, and behaviours that can hurt other people, is often more men than women. When you’re behind the wheel of a vehicle you are in charge of a killing machine.
“Employers in particular need to be thinking about who they are allowing [to drive] for work purposes, and the risks associated with that.
“Education isn’t going to solve things on its own. But in the meantime, these figures that demonstrate that particular segments of society are offending, or involved in more casualties than others, enable us to target campaigns – like Road Safety Week – at those parts of society, and to help our sons, husbands, or partners to prioritise safety.”
