2008 Joint ACRS-Travelsafe National Conference – Non-Peer Reviewed Papers p.311 Gender, age and motor vehicles - which combination is highest risk? Redshaw, S. Macquarie University Children’s Hospital Westmead Abstract The paper will take a global perspective on high-risk road users to begin with, considering not only motor vehicle drivers but also non-motorised users and then working back to consider young men who are probably seen as the highest risk group in Australia. But are they really? The paper will look at gender as a risk factor and age related issues drawing on statistical data from the NSW RTA and QLD Transport as well as social and cultural research from focus group studies with young drivers. Taking into consideration gender, age and the motor vehicle, the primary question of the paper will be: is gender more of a factor than age and how much of the risk factor is due to the motor vehicle itself? In combination these factors are all important and their contributions need to be more deeply examined separately and together. Keywords Young drivers, social framing, gender Introduction The paper examines data from a number of sources to highlight the impact of the car and the gender of the driver on road trauma. The concept of social framing is introduced to help explain the higher crash rates of males that are not explained by risk taking or kilometres traveled, for example. A study of gender differences in Jordan (Al-Balbissi 2003) found that even when kilometers traveled (17,000 for men and 12,000 for women) was taken into account males had a higher rate of crashes (2.42 times on average) (68). Mayhew, Ferguson, Desmond and Simpson (2003) in a study of fatal accident data between 1975 and 1998 in the United States found that many more women were licenced to drive and drove more kilometers but the fatal collision rate for male drivers was still 2.5 times greater than for females. The rate had dropped from 4 times greater in 1975. In a study of age and gender behaviour in Queensland, Turner and McClure (2003) concluded that being male or aged 17-29 years is associated with increased crash risk and that this age and gender differential can in part be explained by risk-taking. How the driver is constructed in the broader social and cultural context is a significant area of concern. While values are considered as contributing to behaviour in frameworks such as the planned behaviour and reasoned action frameworks investigated extensively in relation to road safety by a team of researchers in Britain (Parker, Manstead and Stradling 1995), values are not intensively investigated in their specific contribution to behaviour on the roads (Redshaw 2008). Significant breakdowns in road statistics in Australia tend to be focused on age. In the eight year age range 17–24 there is clearly a higher incidence of fatalities – between 25% and 27% of the total (Table 3). This is related to lack of experience and the time required to gain the relevant experience as well as times and places driven (Ferguson 2003), presence of passengers (Simons-Morton, Lerner and Singer 2005, Senserrick and Haworth 2005, Stevenson 2005) and a tendency to engage in risky driving (Sakar and Andreas 2004, Clarke,