Women Are Getting Hurt More In Car Crashes, Safety Systems May Be Contributing

Car Crash Safety Has Come a Long Way. It Just Hasn’t Come as Far for Women.

When a man and a woman ride in the same car and get into the same crash, the woman is far more likely to be injured. A new study suggests the vehicle’s safety systems may be part of the reason why.

Researchers analyzed Austrian car crash data spanning 2012 to 2024 and found that when a man and a woman are involved in the exact same collision, women face roughly 1.6 times the risk of being injured compared to men. Over that entire period, women’s average likelihood of sustaining an injury held steady at around 89.6%, while men’s sat at about 56.5%. That gap didn’t close over time, even as cars became safer overall.

The study, titled DIVERSE and funded by the Austrian Road Safety Fund, zeroes in on a question the car safety industry has largely sidestepped: are the seatbelts, airbags, and other protective systems inside a vehicle actually designed to protect everyone equally? Based on this research, the answer appears to be: not always.

The Same Crash, a Different Outcome

To understand why, researchers dug into real crashes. From a specialized Austrian crash investigation database called CEDATU, the team hand-picked six head-on collisions where exactly one man and one woman were in the same car, the woman was more seriously injured than the man, and there was no obvious explanation for why.

Those six crashes were then rebuilt using computer models that simulate how the human body moves during a collision. The models represented an average adult male and an average adult female, and researchers tested what happened when they changed variables like how far forward the passenger seat was positioned or how much tension the seatbelt applied during impact.

In the simulations, passenger seat position often stood out as a key factor shaping injury risk. How far a person sits from the dashboard, and how their body engages with the seatbelt and airbag, can make the difference between walking away and being seriously injured.

Seatbelts That Don’t Fit Everyone the Same Way

There’s a specific safety feature at the heart of this problem that most drivers have never thought about: the device controlling how hard a seatbelt pulls back against a person’s body during a crash. It’s designed to slow a person down gradually rather than stopping them all at once, reducing the force on the chest.

The report found that, in some cases, the force levels used by these devices appeared too high for female occupants, which may have contributed to injury risk in the chest, spine, and upper arms, the exact injury patterns researchers saw repeatedly in real crashes. The researchers suggest that “adaptive” versions of this technology, systems smart enough to adjust the restraint force based on the size and position of the person wearing the belt, could help close this gap.

One detail that surprised even the researchers involves winter clothing. A thick jacket reduces friction between a person and their seatbelt, which can cause the body to slip beneath the belt during impact. When that happens, the belt presses into soft abdominal tissue instead of the sturdy pelvic bone, a scenario that can cause serious internal injuries.

Passengers Are at Greater Risk, and Women Are Usually the Passenger

In accidents involving exactly one male and one female occupant, men were the driver more than 80% of the time, and women were the passenger. That matters because the passenger seat turned out to be where the injury gap between men and women was most pronounced.

When looking only at cases where one occupant was hurt worse than the other, women in the passenger seat accounted for 48.37% of those cases. Male drivers were far more likely to walk away uninjured.

Data also suggested women may suffer serious or fatal injuries at lower crash speeds than men, though the report cautions that finding was not statistically significant. This trend was most visible among adults over 50, where women’s risk climbed more steeply with age than men’s.

A System Built Around One Body Type

So why does this gap exist? The study points to a core issue in how vehicle safety systems are developed and tested. Current crash testing, the kind used to certify that a car is safe enough to sell, relies on test dummies in only two different body sizes, and both skew toward the male form. Even the so-called female dummy is just a scaled-down version of the male model, representing a woman smaller than 95% of actual women. “Women are not little men,” said project coordinator Corina Klug of TU Graz. “And models of very small, petite women are often unable to represent what we observe in the accidents.”

Researchers recommend future safety standards require restraint systems to protect people across a wider range of body shapes and seat positions.

Austria’s crash data provided an unusually clean way to see this problem, by comparing men and women in the exact same car through the exact same crash. The simulation work covered only six collisions and some injury-severity findings didn’t reach statistical significance, so the results point in a clear direction without serving as final proof. Car safety has improved enormously over recent decades. But safer cars and equally safe cars for everyone are not yet the same thing.

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Disclaimer: This article is based on observational and simulation research conducted in Austria. Findings related to serious and fatal injuries did not reach statistical significance in all cases and should not be interpreted as definitive conclusions. If you have questions about vehicle safety, consult your vehicle manufacturer or a certified automotive safety resource.

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