Talk about breaking through the glass ceiling. Or, in this case, breaking through the windshield of a car in a crash test. After a half-century of debate on the topic, government regulators for the first time last year made female crash-test dummies a mandatory aspect of crash evaluations. Safety advocates have argued for years that designing cars to be crash-safe based solely on the anatomy of male occupants posed risks for smaller female occupants. Yet for decades automakers continued to use only dummies modeled after the average American male.

Smaller women are three times as likely as an average-sized male driver to be seriously injured in an accident, according to a recent opinion piece in Automotive News by Lee Jared Vinsel, assistant professor of science and technology studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. Vinsel notes that front airbags are designed to strike occupants in the chest when they deploy, but smaller individuals can be hit in the chin instead, resulting in head and neck injuries.

Meanwhile, automakers have maintained that the average-sized test dummy is applicable to 95 percent of the driving population, and that the development of a smaller dummy would be too time-consuming and costly. Under the new requirements, car companies must use small female crash dummies in front collision evaluations for 2011 model-year vehicles and beyond. Vinsel says the long-overdue introduction of female-proportioned dummies “is the product of a long-held cultural resistance to considering gender differences in design.”

He points out that as far back as the late 1950s and early 1960s, the emerging U.S. consumer-safety movement reasoned that government regulation should focus on redesigning cars to make them safer -- and that the focus should not center solely on driver training and policing. The watershed moment was the publication of Ralph Nader’s 1965 book, "Unsafe at Any Speed," which focused consumer (and federal government) attention on the issue, leading to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. This created the first nationwide automotive safety standards.

Car companies “fought the rules at each step,” Vinsel says, particularly against Standard 201, known as Interior Occupant Protection, which focused on what safety advocates called the "second collision” -- i.e. when occupants’ bodies collided with the interior of the vehicle.

The goal was to make the interior of the car safer. Compliance with Standard 201 required placing an anthropomorphic mannequin in a car to identify where it might strike the interior of the vehicle. Standard 201 initially required dummies of two different sizes: one represented a 95th percentile male (only 5 percent of the male population would be larger than the dummy) and a 5th percentile female (only 5 percent of the female population would be smaller).

But in 1973, due to automakers’ insistence that creating a second dummy was too complex and costly, federal regulators for the first time permitted using just one model as a part of safety standards. The mandated dummy, known as Hybrid II, represented the average American male. A female dummy didn't become a mandatory part of frontal crash tests until last year.

Vinsel contends that the new standards “have had a substantial impact on women's auto safety.” He also notes that if airbags are designed only for the average male, they’ll strike in the upper chest, but hit a small woman in the chin, snapping her head back and potentially leading to serious neck and spinal injuries. He adds that, according to tests with female mannequins, small women are almost three times as likely as their average male counterparts to be seriously injured or killed in an accident.

Vinsel writes, “Time and again, we are reminded that women still struggle to receive equal pay and treatment in the workplace. Women haven't received equal treatment in the design of the cars they drive, either -- and it may have had deadly results.”

[Sources: Autoblog, Automotive News.]