Decades of technological advances and regulatory changes have helped make car passengers safer in collisions. But women are still 73% more likely to be severely injured or die in a frontal crash than men and three times as likely to experience injuries such as a broken bones or concussions. Swedish engineer Astrid Linder is trying to eliminate the disparity by developing the first crash-test dummy prototype modeled on an average-size woman.
“The injury statistics show that the gap between men and women isn’t decreasing despite the great improvements in crash safety,” says Linder, an adjunct professor in injury prevention at Sweden’s Chalmers University and research director of traffic safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute.
