While driving with my fiance down a busy road around rush hour, I noticed that the car in front of us had an open gas cap and commented on it. My fiance immediately said, “Stupid women drivers.” I glared at him and asked, “What makes you think that’s a woman?” He said, “Only a woman would forget something like that.”

Unfortunately for his theory, when we passed the luckless vehicle, to my man’s amazement the driver was male. Immediately his tone changed. “Poor dude,” he said. “He must have been really tired.”

It’s too bad that men all over the country consider women to be “terrible drivers” and that the internet is loaded with videos and pictures of women drivers pulling the gas cord with them on the highway, plowing across cement curbs or mindlessly driving the wrong way on a one-way street. When men hear about their female counterparts getting into accidents, the typical response is a shake of the head and “Oh those poor women drivers.”

Although men envision women drivers talking on the cell phone applying lipstick while driving 80 miles per hour, there is a reason why it is becoming increasingly more common for insurance companies to offer cheaper rates to women than they do to men: women simply have fewer accidents.

According to a study by computerquoteinsurance.com, we women may want to thank the bemoaned hormone estrogen for our lack of accidents. The insurance company says that estrogen “may make it easier for [us] to learn new rules, to concentrate and to shift attention from one thing to another.” That’s not to say that we should be putting on lipstick while driving in rush hour on a three-lane highway - but we would be statistically less likely to get into an accident while doing that than a man would be. In fact, AllState says that men - especially those under 25 - are three times more likely to die on the roads than women.

Most of us do lack the seemingly universal male urge to “show off” our driving skills - opting instead to make sure we get from point A to point B in one piece. A lot of women still possess the proverbial lead foot, but a combination of the aforementioned blessed estrogen and an innate maternal instinct that reminds us of the people in the car with us and the people we would leave behind keep us from losing control ... most of the time.

Of course we will still hear stories about the mother who entered when the sign said ’exit,’ the cheerleader who was texting as she drove her whole squad into oncoming traffic and the daughter who went way too fast on the icy highway. But if you pay attention you’ll realize that there are more stories about “those poor male drivers” too.

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