Teenage boys and girls may not have much in common, but at least one difference between the sexes is shrinking: Beginning drivers, male and female, are almost equally bad behind the wheel.

According to statistics from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), 16- and 17-year-old boys are the most accident-prone of all drivers, but the next worst group was not 18-year-old males — it was 16-year-old females.

A typical 16-year-old male had a 21 percent chance of being involved in a crash in 2000, and an average 17-year-old male had a 17.6 percent of crashing. But where the chances of being in a crash dropped to 17.2 percent for 18-year-old males 2000, 16-year-old females had a 17.5 percent chance of being behind the wheel in an accident in 2000.

Furthermore, according to the IIHS figures, which are compiled from data provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the crash rates of 16-year-old males decreased to 210 per 1,000 licensed drivers in 2000 from 216 in 1990, but the crash rates for 16-year-old girls increased from 160 crashes per 1,000 licensed drivers in 1990 to 175 in 2000.

Accident rates for 17- to 19-year-old females drop off far more quickly than for young male drivers. Overall, the crash rate for 16- to 19-year-old females was 12.7 percent — 4 percent less than the 16.7 percent crash rate for male drivers in the same age group.

Russ Rader, a spokesperson for the IIHS, attributes the jump in crashes per 1,000 licensed drivers to the fact that teenage girls are driving more.

"Teen women are driving 70 percent more miles now than in the '70s," says Rader. "When you're driving a lot more, your crash risk goes up."

Indeed, IIHS statistics show that the average miles driven by 16- to 19-year-old females has increased by 70.2 percent from 1977 to 1995, while 16- to 19-year old males drove 16.4 percent more.

Teenage males still drive farther on average, though. In 1995, the average 16- to 19-year-old male drove more than 8,200 miles, but the average female in the same age range drove less than 6,900 miles, according to the IIHS.

Because the most recent data on the number of miles driven by teenagers is from 1995, the IIHS was unwilling to speculate as to how the crash rates for teenage girls in comparison to the number of miles driven might have changed.

The narrowing of the gender gap for teenage crash statistics hasn't gone unnoticed by the insurance industry. According to Dick Luedke, a spokesperson for State Farm Mutual Auto Insurance Co., in 1985 a teenage girl paid about 61 percent less for auto insurance than a male age 16 to 20. But in 2000, that price gap shrank to 41 percent.