Crossing the road, ... .

This blog post is just a small piece about a published student project, which also was covered in the Times (pay-walled) and on improbable.com. In previous work, we have found gender differences in risk taking behaviour in cyclists, such as for example, in crossing a train track. Men were more inclined than women to cross while it was unsafe to do so. In this project we wanted to find out if such a gender difference in risk taking also exists in pedestrians. My brave thesis student, Eryn O’Dowd, spent countless hours observing people and their use of a crossing near a Metro station. All else being equal, we found that women were significantly more likely to use a safe crossing when crossing the road than men did. We interpreted this in line with previous findings on gender differences in risk taking, such as what we found in Dutch cyclists. Obviously, we would need to do more to rule out alternative explanations. For example, it could be that women were more sensitive to norms than men were. In future projects I hope that other students will also go out into the world and use observations to test interesting hypotheses. I hope it will inspire future students to get out into the world. You can find the paper here.