Men have more car accidents than women, and the gap widens dramatically when you look at serious and fatal crashes. In 2019, the motor vehicle traffic death rate for men was 16.0 per 100,000 people, roughly 2.5 times the rate for women at 6.3 per 100,000. But the full picture is more nuanced than that headline number suggests, because the type and severity of crashes differ between genders in ways that matter.
Overall Crash Rates
A 13-year cohort study of young drivers in Australia found that 22.5% of men were involved in a car crash during the study period, compared with 19.0% of women. After adjusting for demographics and how much each group actually drove, men had 1.25 times the rate of any crash compared to women. The gap was even larger for specific crash types: men had more than double the rate of single-vehicle crashes and 1.59 times the rate of crashes in the dark.
In the United States, CDC data shows that male traffic death rates have been more than double female rates for over two decades. Both groups saw improvement between 1999 and 2019, with male rates dropping from 20.4 to 16.0 per 100,000 and female rates falling from 9.4 to 6.3. But that persistent two-to-one ratio has never closed.
Crashes Per Mile Driven
Raw crash totals can be misleading because men drive significantly more miles per year than women on average. When researchers adjusted for miles traveled, the picture shifted in an interesting way. Men had 3.5 fatal crash involvements per 100 million miles driven, while women had 2.2. That gives men a 55% higher fatal crash risk per mile.
For non-fatal injury crashes, though, the pattern reverses. Women were involved in 2.3 injury crashes per million miles compared to 1.8 for men, a 26% higher rate. Women also had a 12% higher rate of property-damage-only crashes per mile. When researchers ran multivariate analyses correcting for annual mileage and other factors, the overall difference in crash involvement between men and women largely disappeared. What remained different was the severity: men’s crashes are far more likely to kill someone.
Why Men’s Crashes Are More Severe
The severity gap comes down to how men and women tend to crash. Among teen drivers involved in fatal crashes, male teens were significantly more likely to be speeding (38% vs. 25%), driving with a blood alcohol level at or above the legal limit (21% vs. 12%), and driving recklessly (17% vs. 14%). Male teens were also more likely to be driving at night (41% vs. 36%) and to be involved in rollover crashes.
Female drivers, by contrast, were more likely to be involved in intersection-style collisions. Nearly one quarter of fatal crashes involving female teens were right-angle “t-bone” crashes, compared with 17% for males. These crashes are serious, but the speed and alcohol-related crashes that skew male tend to be deadlier.
Seatbelt use plays a role too. A large systematic review found that 51.5% of female drivers wore seatbelts compared to just 38.3% of male drivers. That 13-percentage-point gap in compliance translates directly into worse outcomes for men when crashes do happen.
The Gender Gap Among Teen Drivers
The difference between male and female crash risk is most extreme among young drivers, and it grows with each year of age through the teens. At age 16, boys account for 64% of teen fatal crashes while girls account for 36%. By age 19, boys make up 73% and girls just 27%. The widening gap tracks closely with alcohol involvement: among 15-year-olds, 9% of boys’ fatal crashes involved high blood alcohol levels, rising to 21% by age 19. For girls, the increase was smaller, from 3% to 11%.
One striking pattern is how speeding changes with age differently for each gender. For female teens, the proportion of fatal crashes involving speeding dropped from 38% at age 15 to 22% at age 19. For male teens, it stayed flat at around 38% regardless of age. In other words, young women seem to grow out of speeding risk as they gain experience, while young men do not.
How This Affects Insurance Costs
Insurance companies in most states use gender as one factor in setting premiums, and the data behind this pricing is straightforward: men file more costly claims. Currently, the average annual premium is $2,184 for men and $2,151 for women, a difference of about $33 per year or 1.5%. Men pay more than women in 38 states, while 7 states prohibit gender as a rating factor entirely.
The insurance gap has actually flipped in recent years. Back in 2018, women paid an average of $10 more per year nationally. By 2025, men pay $33 more. The shift reflects updated actuarial models that increasingly weight the higher severity and cost of male-involved crashes. State-by-state variation is significant, ranging from a $1 difference to nearly a 5% gap depending on where you live.
The Bottom Line on Gender and Crash Risk
Men cause more crashes in total, are involved in far more fatal crashes, and engage in riskier driving behaviors including speeding, drunk driving, and not wearing seatbelts. Women have a slightly higher rate of minor crashes per mile driven, likely reflecting differences in driving environments (more urban, intersection-heavy routes) rather than skill. When you control for all measurable factors, men and women are similarly likely to be in a crash on any given mile of driving. The real difference is what happens when things go wrong: men’s crashes are significantly more likely to be deadly.