A recent study conducted by Toyota Motor Company found that although men are more likely to die in car crash, women were much more likely to suffer a severe ankle injury than their male counterparts. Is it because they are all driving in high heels, or are there other factors at play? Below, we explain why women tend to suffer worse ankle injuries during automobile accidents than men.
Women Ankle Injuries In Car Accidents
Toyota conducted the safety research to get a better understanding of the overall impact of traffic crashes, and they uncovered some interesting information in regards to ankle injuries suffered by women during a car crash.
“When we look just at the injuries and assume that someone is in a crash, it’s the female ankle injury that’s been reported up to three times higher risk compared to males,” said Jason Hallman, senior manager at Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center, or CSRC, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during a media briefing there.
Researchers at the CSRC and the University of Virginia teamed up in an attempt to learn more about these odd ankle injury statistics among women. When looking at the possibility that footwear choices played a role in this difference, researchers didn’t find anything of note.
“Females that experienced ankle fracture, a very, very small percentage were wearing heels,” said Jason Forman an associate professor at the University of Virginia. “Most were wearing sneakers, just like the males. A slightly greater proportion of females were wearing flats compared to the males. Overall it seemed like the distribution of footwear amongst these ankle fracture cases followed quite closely what we would expect based on the distribution of the types of shoes that people wear in normal, everyday life. So nothing stood out as footwear being the sole contributor.”
Researchers then turned their attention to the possibility that gender differences could play a role in this heightened fracture risk. When looking at CT scans, they found that size differences in the ankle bones likely contributed to this fracture risk disparity.
“Sure enough, it turns out that females on average tend to have ankle bones that are about 20% smaller than males, even after controlling for overall differences in stature,” said Forman. “So there is an observable effect of sex on ankle bone shape, beyond simple differences in overall body size.”
Automobile accidents typically involve high levels of force being applied to the body, and oftentimes it’s the feet and ankles that first observe this force. If men have slightly larger and stronger bones than their female counterparts as a result of gender differences, this could impact whether or not the bones can handle this high impact trauma without fracturing. Biological differences appear to be the main driver of this interesting difference in ankle fracture risk during a car accident.
And while solutions may not be obvious, Forman noted that this information will hopefully be used going forward to improve safety features that could help mitigate this fracture risk.
“Now that we know this, we can start to integrate this information into our safety assessment tools and that’s going to be the next step to help take some of these fundamental personal differences and account for them and how we design and evaluate safety systems with the final goal being to drive safety innovations for all,” said Forman.