Gender Inequality in Vehicle Safety: Insights from Logistic Regression and Random Forest Analysis

Previous studies show that a female driver and right-front (RF) passenger have 13.4% and 20.5% more fatality risk, respectively, compared to a male of the same age; the addition of new safety precautions reduced this fatality risk gap. However, it has yet to be uncovered if these precautions improve the equity in protection against non-fatal/major injuries. Using Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) data, Logistic Regression and Random Forest, this study models the non-fatal/major injury risks against age and gender to answer this question. The double-pair comparison method is used to evaluate the major injury risk between females and males with different ages and vehicle model years. It shows that females have a 35% higher major injury risk relative to males of the same age; even with newer model vehicles, the major injury risk for females relative to the males is decreased by roughly 2.3% only, which shows that technological advancements have improved equity, but further improvement is still needed. These results signify that the equity in protection between males and females is still large, which calls for the automobile industry to work toward better equity in protection.