Reckless Driving and Gender Bias
A few days ago, I was out running errands. I was sitting in my car getting ready to go home when another car hit mine. I was in a marked spot on a fairly busy street that runs north/south, parked parallel to the northbound curb. The driver of the pickup truck that hit me backed out of a parking lot across the street, across another parking lane and two traffic lanes, at as high a speed as he could muster in the space of exiting a parking lot and crossing three lanes, in an effort to make a Y-turn to get to a northbound position, he hit my car. Now, he could have just driven forward out of the parking lot and turned left to get into the same northbound lane. Like any normal person would do. But for whatever reason, he decided that backing up across three lanes without looking to see if anyone was in the fourth – the parking lane – was the way to go. He pulled over about 50 yards down the street, we exchanged information, a police officer came and took a report.
The reason I’m writing about this is because I think there were definitely gender influenced elements in play. He was about 70, his truck was old and beaten up, he was dressed in hunting camouflage, his clothes were visibly dirty, and he smelled bad. The first thing I thought when he pulled away was that a) he was not going to stop, and b) if he did stop, he was going to be unpleasant, based on the bumper stickers on the truck and its age and condition. So there we have me stereotyping him. I was pleasantly surprised that he stopped and was polite and not argumentative. I let him sit in my car and use my phone because he needed to cancel an appointment he was going to miss while we waited for the police to respond. He tried to convince me we didn’t need to wait for the police or get a report. I got contact information from a witness. He tried to convince me that I didn’t need that, either.
The police officer never questioned why the man would have backed out of a parking lot – not a driveway, a parking lot, with lots of room to turn around – to make a Y-turn across three lanes on a busy road, instead of just pulling forward in a left turn onto the northbound lanes. What he did was both harder and more dangerous than what he should have done. And yet the officer just said “well, that’s why they’re called accidents”.
Somehow, I have to wonder whether the result would have been the same if *I* had hit the old, white guy in the same manner as he hit me.
Bear with me for a minute. How many times have you ever heard jokes about what bad drivers men are? Have you ever heard anyone criticized as a “man driver!”? Have you ever heard anyone gripe that a man was probably not paying attention to the road because he was engaging in personal grooming in the car? No. You probably haven’t. I never have. We deal with presumption based on bias every day, and one that permeates our social intercourse is that men are the norm, the standard for pretty much everything, including competence in operating all kinds of machinery, from cars to computers. In fact, as I write, there is a large poster at my local Staples in Tech Services that says “Have you ever wished you had your own personal tech guy 24/7?” (emphasis added). Do you see what’s wrong with that? The man behind the counter that I pointed it out to didn’t. Neither did the man I just spoke to on the phone to get the exact wording so I wouldn’t be misquoting. He laughed and tried to sell me the service. It's a national campaign, and no one at Staples, at any level, thinks that’s a problem. Otherwise, it wouldn’t say that. But you know that everyone would notice if it said tech gal, tech woman, or even tech expert – accompanied by a photo of a woman. In other words, if the poster indicated that your tech assistance was going to come from anyone other than a man.
That is why I think it is highly likely that if that middle aged, white male officer had seen a woman, any woman, but particularly an elderly, slovenly dressed, smelly woman driving a beat-up old vehicle – it would be worse, I’m afraid, if she/me were driving a pickup truck because pickup truck still says “male” – that had just engaged in a dangerous and probably illegal, totally unnecessary maneuver that caused an accident, the officer’s response wouldn’t have been “well, that’s why they call them accidents”. Don’t get me wrong, the officer was perfectly pleasant and helpful. But he cut the other driver slack that I just don’t think he would have cut me if the situation were reversed, even though men drive recklessly far more often than women do.
That’s sexism. It’s built-in, implicit bias. It’s something we all need to be aware of and fight against every single day.