Women in Trucking

67 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 12 As more women considered careers in the trucking industry, the association’s push for data intensified. Finally, as diversity and inclusion initiatives became more prevalent, companies started looking at the data and breaking it down by gender. Trucking company executives are in agreement that their female drivers are extremely safe. WIT has listened to anecdotal evidence that female drivers have been better with customers, better with the paperwork, and have taken better care of the equipment as well as demonstrating that they have been much easier to train. Although the WIT has appreciated this feedback, it remains difficult to tout the benefits of female drivers without real data. In 2018, the American Transportation Research Institute released its crash causation study which used roadside inspection data (and cross-referenced their commercial driver’s license to get the gender data) to review 439,260 roadside inspection reports. They evaluated the violations and then reviewed the drivers’ commercial driving history. The results were broken down by age and gender. Women comprised 2.45 percent of the sample. However, the data included nearly 11,000 female drivers. The conclusion is notable, as their summary found that the driver’s gender had the most significant impact on safe driving. Men were 88 percent more likely to have a reckless/careless/inattentive or negligent driving conviction than women. Men were 73 percent more likely to fail to obey a traffic signal and 40 percent more likely to be convicted of ANY offense. The World Health Organization reported that “masculinity” may be hazardous to health and cited risky driving as one factor. Research in the United Kingdom by the University of Westminster reported that men make up 95 percent of all commercial drivers in their