Stereotypes Of Women Drivers

Women Drivers!
Problem - Solution Essay
Apsara Engel, Social Studies 8a

Women drivers have often been the butt of many jokes, from Meet the Jetsons to Alan Partridge and ordinary one-liners. Stereotypes are a simple generalisation of a group of people, often from a lack of understanding or exposure from that group. Unfortunately, stereotypes are still a large part of our daily lives - especially the women are bad drivers one. In the 1950s, a popular poster was created about a woman in a driving school, depicting her as clueless and incapable of even sitting correctly on the driver’s seat. This generalisation, or stereotype, has a long history that started in the early 1910s. As a result, women have often been discriminated against with limited
Women then had the opportunity to learn how to drive, as men had left to fight in World War I. Women were then presented with the opportunity to learn how to drive. However, during the same time both genders were conditioned to believe that women should stay in the house and stay away from masculine things - like a car, for example. To make cars seem less appealing to women, the media (consisting of both genders) would create stereotypes describing them as bad or incapable of driving. Thus began the long history of the stereotype; both genders would see women drive and create ideas to discourage women from doing it again. In 1986, Michael L. Berger wrote an essay about women drivers describing them as fragile and unable to make correct decisions. "The delicate physical and emotional constitution of women, poor decision-making in crisis situations, a woman's place was in the home, femininity, cleanliness" (Berger,1986: 257-260). According to Berger, women lack the decision-making and quantitative skills required to operate a car, which in turn causes them to become horrible drivers. He continues to write that as cars are machinery, and therefore masculine, women shouldn’t corrupt their femininity by indulging in the act of driving; they should just stay at home. To sum up, this stereotype started when cars were still a
Self-fulfilling prophecies are usually the result of a stereotype on a person; they become what they have been called. A couple of years ago, researchers from the university of Queensland conducted an experiment where they compared how women who have heard the stereotype and women who haven’t drove in a simulation. They asked 168 women and told half of them that they were testing if men are better drivers than women and the other half that they were researching the processes in driving. Around half of the women from the stereotype group hit the jaywalker that they were subjected to in the simulation. In 1963, Meet the Jetsons aired a proudly sexist episode aiming at women drivers. The episode, called Millionaire Astro, was about Jane Jetson learning how to drive. Essentially, the episode displayed how bad the average women is at driving. This gave young girls watching the episode the impression that all women are bad at driving, causing yet another self-fulfilling prophecy. In addition to that, female drivers are a popular source of jokes on the internet. If you search up “women drivers” on google, thousands of images will emerge of some sort of accident with the title “women drivers”. Women drivers are treated as if they are all idiots on the internet - something that is sexist and wrong. Female drivers are being treated as if they were all idiots online, on TV-shows, etc. and it is