At last, statistics that prove a sexist stereotype... Women are worse at parking
By Emily Andrews
26th September 2011
It’s long been the source of domestic strife. Are women really worse at parking than men?
Sorry ladies, official figures have revealed the truth: we are not very good at parking a car.
Almost a third of all women who failed their driving test last year came unstuck due to parallel parking.
Of the 170,000 women who failed their driving test in 2010 for mistakes in reversing or failing to use their mirrors, 55,000 failed on parking.
And if those figures - released by the Driving Standards Agency - are not enough to ensure a rare victory for men in the battle of the sexes, then they have the support of science as well.
Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany asked 65 volunteers to park a £23,000 Audi - and found that women took up to 20 seconds longer than men.
Some women blame the problem on the fact their breasts make it more difficult to turn around while parking.
However, when they do eventually pass - one woman finally got through last year at the 21st attempt over 22 years - they will at least have the consolation of cheaper car insurance.
The figures back up another stereotype: the boy racer.
When young men get behind the wheel the testosterone goes into overdrive.
It helps to explain why almost 40,000 men were failed last year for moving off too fast, while another 30,500 fell foul of their examiner for jumping the lights.
The agency has listed the top five faults by gender for those who failed.
The most frequent - forgetting to check right, left and then right again at junctions - was common to both sexes.
About 1.5million people take a driving test each year.
‘So far this year the pass rate is 50.7 per cent for men and 44.1 per cent for women,’ said an agency spokesman.
Female drivers need an average 52 hours of tuition to pass but men speed through in just 36 hours of lessons.
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