Female drivers have to endure a fair bit of banter from their male counterparts, but such postulations have now been given some basis in reality, following the release of driving test data from the DVA under the Freedom of Information Act.

Of the 1,660,206 fail-worthy mistakes recorded over 2010-11, 718,244 were committed by men and 941,962 by women. From the overall figures of those who actually took the driving test, there was a 50% fail rate for men and a 57% fail rate for women. And when it comes to parking, a similar disparity can be seen. That most challenging of manoeuvres, the reverse-park, was responsible for 18,798 failures for men, while 40,863 female learners failed because of it.

 

The figures will no doubt disgruntle a few women drivers. But they should take heart from a recent report, based on covert surveillance in a car park, suggesting that women actually park better than men. The videos demonstrated that while women take longer to park, they tend to park in the middle of the space.

It is also worth noting that instructors say that while men master basic driving skills quicker than women, they tend to develop bad habits after a short time on the road. Women, by contrast, are said to retain their driving skills for much longer.

Despite the fear that parking puts into most drivers, there are very few incidents that lead to drivers calling upon their annual breakdown cover policies, startrescue.co.uk can confirm. Such news, however, will do little to dampen male-female friction on the topic!