The section where she discusses the time when women started driving and its effect on society, Ms. Tomooka shared with us the first woman driver and she's none other than Genevra Mudge of New York City. It was mentioned here that driving was limited to the wealthy and so one can come to a conclusion that only a few women drivers had driven a car before. She furthermore explained how women came to be negatively stereotyped and she mentioned that Berger wrote in his essay that women are "ill suited to drive motor cars without male companionship." So, implying that women cannot drive a car unless a man is riding with her and I don't see how they came up with that idea. Is it because they think we don't know how to change tires, or check the hood for whatever is wrong with the car? That's silly, because I know some women who are good with cars and you just have to give us a chance. Finally, she continued her report by discussing how more women had finally started driving a car. It was because of the war that women had given the chance to drive a car. She believes that these stereotypes were "invented to maintain the social status of society."
Finally, she discusses the topic of driving and gender differences. For this section, she shares with us the study that Furnham and Saipe did in 1993 on "Personality Correlates of Convicted Drivers." Here, she says that the results they have gathered, where more young men scored higher than young women did on psychotism, "thrill and adventure seeking and boredom susceptibility and having more convictions than females," can be correlated to the idea that "women in some respects are better drivers." Another study she included is that of Tipton, Camp, and Hsu they did in 1990 on the usage of seat belts amond male and female college students. The findings of this study suggests that there was a decline in usage of seatbelt amongst males and an increase in females "16 months after the law was put into effect," because, as Tipton and his colleagues stated, "...male students are more resistant to having their behavior standardized and less likely to internalize changes forced on them." Isn't that really true! I have noticed that about my boyfriend, also.
A couple more studies she shares with us are: McKenna, Stanier, and Lewis' study on the self-assessment of driving skills in males and females; And Panek & Wagner's study on personality variables in relation to moving violations in women. McKenna et al, found that more males rated themselves higher than females in their driving skills. Ms. Tomooka concluded that "men are more likely to have a higher self-assessment of their driving skills than women, though men and women have basically the same conception of the average driver." The other study done on personality variables in relation to moving violations in women was conducted by Panek and Wagner in 1986. They found out that "individuals who have a tendency to be dominant and assertive tend to have more accidents than individuals who are not." I guess, the reason why the more dominant and assertive individuals are more liable to get into an accident is because they don't want anybody telling them what to do. In her conclusion, she said that after doing a report on the different studies conducted by male researchers, she came to understand "one possibility of how women attained the stereotype of being poor drivers." I thought, she did a good job researching for studies done on stereotyping of women, and gender differences on driving. It was well-written, she had references to prove that she's done her work or research correctly, and she presented her report neatly.
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