Girl Meets Boy, at 60 Miles an Hour explains how “Young women are crashing cars — and dying in cars — at significantly higher rates than a decade ago”:
They’re driving, in other words, like guys.Federal highway officials are so alarmed by this that they put it near the top of a recent press release, citing among 15- to- 20-year-olds a 42 percent increase in young female driver fatalities from 1992 to 2002 (the rate for young males rose 15 percent). State Farm Insurance, a leading auto insurer, has monitored the trend and adjusted its rates for girls accordingly: from 61 percent less than boys’ rates in 1985, to 40 percent less today.
[...]
Wright says the agency is going to have to expand its research because although teenage boys still crash more often than girls, the gap is narrowing. Sixteen-year-old female drivers, for example, were involved nationally in 175 car crashes per 1,000 licensed drivers in 2000, up from 160 crashes in 1990. Boys’ involvement declined over the same period, from 216 to 210. There are about as many female as male licensed drivers under 21: 6 million.
Read the whole article for some accounts of brazen, unapologetic stupidity.