Long considered more responsible than boys behind the wheel, a growing number of girls admit speeding and aggressive driving. And their insurance rates are rising.
By The Wall Street Journal
By The Wall Street Journal
Some big auto insurers are raising the rates they charge to cover teenage girls, reflecting the crumbling of conventional wisdom that girls are more responsible than boys behind the wheel.
In a survey of teenage drivers, Allstate Insurance found that 48% of girls said they were likely to drive 10 mph over the speed limit. By comparison, 36% of the boys admitted speeding. Of the girls, 16% characterized their own driving as aggressive, up from 9% in 2005. And just more than half of the girls said they were likely to drive while talking on a phone or texting, compared with 38% of the boys.
The results were "a surprise to many people," says Meghann Dowd of the Allstate Foundation, an independent charitable organization funded by Allstate that sponsored the survey.
While teens 'fessed up about their own bad behavior, they said their friends drive even worse. Sixty-five percent of the respondents in the study, male and female, said they were confident in their own driving skills, but 77% said they had felt unsafe when another teen was driving. Only 23% of teens agreed that most teens are good drivers. This suggests teens recognize in their friends the dubious and dangerous behavior they won't admit to indulging in themselves.
The data were gleaned from online interviews with 1,063 teens across the country. It was conducted in May 2009 for the Allstate Foundation by Tru, a youth research and marketing firm in Chicago.
The survey relied on what teens reported about themselves, and Dowd says that means the results could have been affected by how forthcoming individuals were when answering the survey questions.