There are numerous sources for the statistics. I must first say that my wording is incorrect -- women do not cause "more" accidents than men, but they do cause more
per mile driven.
The difficult part is finding those that are corrected by
miles driven rather than by percentage of licenses. Men make up about 50% of licensed drivers but drive some 80% of the miles driven. Many groups correct their data incorrectly which leads to the incorrect conclusion that men are more at risk for accidents than women. While they are ahead by frequency they are not by
rate. Meaning that if you and your wife drove the same distance to work everyday she would have a greater chance of being in an accident.
I just did a quick google for some but I'm not having much luck finding some that aren't corrected by license numbers. I've seen some in the past though. The one I really liked was from Wisconsin and was recent, but I'm not having any luck finding it today.
Note that this data is before the big cell phone boom which is blamed for an even higher increase in the accident rate among women.
Here's a link to a good, more recent study:
http://www.atsb.gov.au/road/pdf/cr177.pdf
One conclusion from that study is that women are up to 1.8 times as likely to be injured in an accident than men.
I believe this same study also goes into likelihood of single-vehicle accidents among men and women, which men are far liklier to have because of their tendency to speed and also drive drunk. If one were to remove single-vehicle accidents, which isn't even covered under the liability coverage that many teens have anyhow, the accident rates for teenage women would
far exceed that of men.
