Are Women Bad Drivers?

According to scientific research conducted in 2002, men are worse!  Here's a quick analysis of that research from John Stossel:

Women have a bad reputation when it comes to driving... But researchers with the Social Issues Resource Center beg to differ. Their 2002 report analyzed a stack of studies on male and female driving differences and came to a bold conclusion: "In all studies and analyses, without exception, men have been shown to have a higher rate of crashes than women." 

Men, the report claims, drive faster than women and have less regard for traffic laws: They speed, they drive drunk, run stop signs, and therefore crash twice as often as women do. In the US, men cause 71% of all road fatalities, a figure that's remained constant since 1975. 

But don't men drive many more miles than women do?  Wouldn't that account for some of the difference? It's true that males account for 62% of all miles driven, vs. 38% for females, but even after miles are clocked and driving hours are factored in, men still get in way more fatal accidents [about 40% more].

So maybe it's time to give the ladies a break. :)

Women's Ski Jump

As we learned on Monday, there is no women's ski jumping event in the Olympics. How is that possible?

According to a July, 2009, NPR story, a British Columbia Supreme Court justice ruled that allowing a men's ski jump event but not a women's constitutes discrimination. Unfortunately, the Canadian courts don't make the decisions about Olympic events, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) does.

The IOC claims that gender has nothing to do with their decision not to include women's ski jump. They state that it's entirely technical. The NPR article says:

Those technical issues include the number of women ski jumping at an elite level and the number of countries competing in the sport. IOC officials have argued that too few women and countries compete to justify Olympic competition.

Apparently there aren't that many male ski jumpers either, but the sport is always included because of tradition (it is one of the oldest Winter Game sports).

Ironically, prior to the 2010 games, the world record holder for the ski jump was a woman! She's an American named Lindsey Van, and beat the record for any woman OR man. She even achieved that record on the exact same hill in Vancouver that the ski jump events are held on this year.

Olympians are still going to fight for the women's ski jump in the 2014 games, but we'll have to just wait and see.

Benefits of Starving a Man

I heard on NPR's "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me" yesterday that hungry men tend to be attracted to more voluptuous women. Researchers think that it has to do with primitive instincts; in places where food is scarce, a man would want to find a woman with the best chance of survival.

This may explain why American men often prefer super skinny women - we're in the Land of Plenty. There are not too many truly starving men around.

But it's not too hard to distract an American guy away from food for a while... just to see what happens... ;)

(an analysis of the study from the BBC is here)