America Just Forced Automakers To Finally Fix A Deadly Gender Gap

America is finally giving the other half of its population a seat at the crash-test table. Answering a call safety researchers have been making for decades, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has unveiled the nation’s first advanced female crash-test dummy.

And for once, it’s not just a scaled-down version of the male model. It’s built from the ground up to represent real women.

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If you’re surprised this didn’t already exist, you’re not alone. Despite women making up roughly 50 percent of all drivers, American crash-test standards have historically relied almost entirely on male-bodied dummies.

And when “female” versions were used, they were often just smaller male dummies with none of the biomechanical differences that matter in an impact.

In some federal tests, the smaller dummy was even placed in the passenger seat, leaving the driver’s seat to the male dummy every time.

The data gap wasn’t small, either. Women are 73 percent more likely to be seriously injured compared with men in identical head-on crashes. And female drivers and front-seat passengers are 17 percent more likely to be killed than men, NBC News reports.

Why This Dummy Matters

Enter the THOR-05F. Standing about the size of a typical 5th-percentile woman, she’s packed with sensors and updated biomechanics that reflect female anatomy, posture, muscle distribution, and joint behavior.

She can measure forces and injuries in places older Hybrid III dummies couldn’t dream of, including soft-tissue impacts, detailed chest deflection, and rotational head movement that better mirrors how real bodies behave in real crashes.

For automakers, this isn’t just a cool science toy. It’s a coming requirement. Regulators plan to integrate THOR-05F into federal crash-test protocols, meaning future vehicles will need to protect everyone, not just the imaginary slim man who has ruled the safety lab for decades.

Carmakers will have to demonstrate safety performance using both male and female dummies, ensuring features like airbags, seatbelt tensioning, seating geometry, and crumple zones work for a much wider range of drivers.

When Will It Happen?

Safety advocates are calling it overdue, and even though it was launched this week, testing featuring the new dummy won’t begin until 2027 at the earliest, with its use eventually becoming mandatory.

Automakers may grumble about the added test time and expense, plus the more complicated vehicle engineering that the results might demand, but the end result could be safer cars for millions of women.