Rising toll of drink driving by stressed working women

Heather Ward a road safety expert says that women are making up a greater proportion of drink drivers because of the stress in their lives. 
 
Family problems such as marital breakdown and children leaving home are a factor behind many – particularly professionals in their 40s – getting behind the wheel when they are over the limit.
 
Mrs Ward, a road safety consultant at University College London, was speaking at the UK Road Safety Summit on drink, drugs and mobile phones recently and called for a lower breathalyser limit because the current threshold is based on how men, who have larger bodies on average, metabolise alcohol rather than women.

She said women’s bodies process alcohol differently meaning they reach higher blood alcohol concentrations than men when drinking the same amount, even when body weight is taken into account. Stress levels and diet can also affect how alcohol is processed by the body.
 
Mrs Ward said: ‘Women in their middle ages are often fairly stressed. They’ve got family issues, children leaving home, marital breakdown. I spoke to one woman whose husband had left her for a younger woman and she started to drink. She got in the car and she was caught.

Her research has found women in their 40s were more likely to be over the limit than men of a similar age, once the proportion of time they spent on the road was taken into account. It also revealed the proportion of drink driving convictions committed by women nearly doubled from 9 per cent in 1998 to 17 per cent in 2012, despite the overall number of convictions dropping. While the conviction rate for men halved from 0.49 per cent to 0.24 per cent between 2003 and 2012, the rate for women changed ‘very little’ from 0.07 per cent to 0.06 per cent.She said other reasons women were drink-driving included professional pressures and safety concerns.

‘Women are drinking more,’ she added. ‘There is more (social) permission for them to drink: they settle down later, they work longer hours, they go out socialising after work, they get on the train, they get in the car left at the station and drive home – and they get caught drink driving.‘A lot of them are frightened of using taxis, they are worried about using public transport, so they think: “I’ll take the risk”.’

She said nearly 60 per cent of the women who were asked why they drove when over the limit said they felt they ‘knew’ their own bodies.
 
Just under a third felt it would be ‘OK if I drove carefully’, while one in six felt there was ‘no alternative’ – for example because one of their children needed help. Around one in seven felt they would not get caught because police ‘only stopped men’.
 
Mrs Ward said many women still believed they would be fine to drive ‘after a couple of glasses of wine’ but that most were unaware that wine was served in larger glasses and had got ‘stronger and stronger’ over the past decade. Mrs Ward said most anti-drink-driving advertising was targeted at men, which meant women could feel it did not apply to them. She added: ‘We need to recognise that women need to be thought about more, and more messages directed at them.’
 
The research she co-authored, published last year, was led by Dr Claire Corbett, of Brunel University, supported by insurers Direct Line, the Rees Jeffery Road Fund and Social Research Associates. It concluded: ‘There is a case for lowering the limit to reflect the effect of alcohol on women’s bodies.’ The current drink drive limit in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is 80mg in 100ml of blood, which is equivalent to two units.
 
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