Ladies, start your engines! You've done a great job catching up with men in the corporate rat race, but statistics show you're picking up speed when it comes to risky driving habits that have traditionally been pinned on men.
In many cases, especially among young women, car insurance rates for females are going up to reflect their risky driving. Many experts say that women are not necessarily becoming more aggressive on the road — there are simply more female drivers and they are driving more often then ever before, which increases their risks of car accidents.
"Years ago, men did more of the driving," says Loretta Worters, spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute (III). "Today, women are going to school, and more women are in the workforce, so they are on the road more than, let's say, 20 years ago."
In 1963, roughly 43 percent of drivers (about 40 million motorists) were women. Today, more than 88 million women make up almost half of all drivers in the United States, according to III. And, alarmingly, they're hitting the roads drunkenly.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA), an increasing number of women are driving under the influence of alcohol. Arrests for women driving under the influence increased by nearly 30 percent from 1998 to 2007. During that same decade, DUI arrests for men decreased by roughly 7.5 percent.
"There are probably many reasons why more women are driving under the influence," says Eric Bolton, spokesperson for NHTSA. "Women are under a lot of pressure to be all things to all people. They have to be supermoms, top-notch executives in the workplace, and with all these efforts come pressures and more women, like their male counterparts, are drinking while driving. While drinking and driving is still a major male problem, women are increasingly becoming a safety concern."
The NHTSA has identified 10 states that have experienced the largest increases in the number of drunk female drivers involved in fatal crashes: Ohio, New Hampshire, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, West Virginia, Indiana, Washington, Kansas and Tennessee.
Car insurance companies have noticed this trend — and women's car insurance rates are starting to reflect it. This is especially true for young female drivers.
"The cost of auto insurance has slowly increased for women, gradually erasing a [cost] disparity that once existed between the genders," Worters says.
The increase is most notable in how much younger female drivers are paying above the base rate (an insurer's average rate charged before discounts and other adjustments, plus the insurance company's claims-processing fee) for car insurance.
Thirty years ago, female drivers between the ages of 17 to 24 paid roughly 46 percent above the car insurance base rate, while young men paid an average of 187 percent more, Worters said. Today, young male drivers are paying about the same (185 percent above the base rate) while women's rates skyrocketed to 120 percent — up by 74 percentage points.
That said, women are still driving much better overall than their male counterparts. According to Quality Planning Corp., an ISO company that validates policyholder information for auto insurance companies, women still commit fewer traffic offenses then men: They receive fewer citations than men for reckless driving, seatbelt violations, speeding, failure to yield and driving under the influence.
