KEY POINTS:
Memo to men: if you're hitting the highway this holiday season, the smartest thing to do just before you set off might be to toss the car keys to the woman in your life.
New research by a company in the US that specialises in risk assessment for insurance companies confirms what women have been saying all along: they are better drivers than men.
If you're a man and you feel your hackles rise at the very suggestion, you've already helped prove the point, since men's tendency towards aggressive responses is part of the problem. But there's no reason to feel bad about it. It's part of humans' evolutionary hard-wiring that men take more risks than women.
Studies of behaviour in all sorts of areas from financial management to, ahem, driving, show that men are the greater risk-takers. The newest findings, reported on msn.com this week, show that men are almost 3.5 times more likely than women to engage in reckless driving and 1.75 times more likely to speed.
The thing is that blokes can't help it. Throughout human evolutionary history, men have faced greater sexual selection pressures. That means they have had to show off in order to impress the girls - which presumably explains a lot of boys' driving.
But they also had to go and fight the woolly mammoths in the snow while the women kept the babies warm by the fire in the cave.
Bottom line: don't fight it, boys. Take the passenger seat. At least that way there'll be somebody navigating who knows how to read a map.
