Traffic-fatality statistics contain a quandary: Men are more likely to cause car accidents, but women are more likely to die in them. One potential reason is that the crash-test dummies used for generations to develop airbags and other automobile-safety systems are based on protecting men's bodies, and fail to take into account the differences in women's bodies. Other factors are certainly at play, but test dummies always should reflect the real-life physical features of the humans they're designed to mimic.

America has come a long way from the early days of the automobile, when automakers shrugged off advice from their own engineers and refused to install, for example, seatbelts on grounds that it would make consumers think the cars were unsafe. That tragically circular thinking is the reason annual automobile death counts of the past were so much higher than they are today. Federal mandates for things like seatbelts, airbags and other design improvements have saved countless lives since they were first imposed starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was in that era when the modern crash-test dummy was born to fulfill federal mandates requiring crash testing of cars. However — in a reflection of the "Mad Men" era from which they sprang — dummies were not based on the average adult American, but rather on the average American adult male.

Even later, when federal regulations were updated to require that automakers also test the effects of crashes on female victims, they responded mostly by just making slightly smaller versions of the same male dolls. And they tested those faux-female dummies primarily in either the passenger seat or the back seat — again, reflecting social mores of an earlier era that don't apply in modern life.

Do automobile accidents really injure women differently from men? Both medical science and actual crash data say yes. The generally smaller skeletal structure of women, and the difference in abdominal shape, mean they tend to sit closer to the steering wheel. And women have differences in muscle and bone mass that can make them more susceptible than men to, for example, whiplash.

Generations of automobiles have been designed around data gathered from those male-centric crash tests, and it puts women at a deadly disadvantage on the road. Statistics show a female driver today is 73% more likely than a male driver to suffer serious injury in a car accident and is 17% more likely to die.

As recounted in a recent Washington Post op-ed co-authored by former U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari, R-N.Y., evidence abounds to justify a major overhaul of federal safety requirements to mandate that car makers more accurately take into account gender when testing the effects of crashes. They should also be testing for differences in body weight, age and other factors. To borrow a popular phrase from the politicians, America's crash-test dummies should look more like America.

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