I was walking the dog this morning when a driver was rude to me. Details can be provided if you’re interested, but the significant fact was the driver’s failure to signal a turn to the right. If I’d known the car was going to turn before it reached me, I wouldn’t have waited for it to pass. My act of courtesy was repaid with rudeness, and I’ll confess I was immediately irritated. I checked out the driver as the car turned: a woman behind a reprimand-proof window.

Even as I tried to convert my disapproval to sympathy (poor thing – she must not know how to walk or she wouldn’t have shined on the waiting pedestrian), I was aware of the bias – women drivers! – and I didn’t want to be there. And then I wasn’t.

For as quickly as “women drivers!” jumped up in my mind, a correction jumped higher – it’s not about gender; it’s about use.

The truth is we use our cars in two different ways, and we go down a deadend path when we try to group driving habits into one.

Cars are used to cover distance fast, or to haul. When we drive for speed over distance, we want high-performance vehicles and we see ourselves as pilots. We strap in, pay attention, scan the horizon, stay tuned. When we use the car to fetch purchases or cart kids, we don’t care so much how the vehicle looks or drives. Pretty gets dinged or stolen anyway. We want shelter and room but basically we need a motorized cart. We’re not pilots. We’re operators.

Now consider who drives how. The distance/speed runs are road trips or commutes. The drivers tend to be men.

The drayage trips are made by householders and care providers. These tend to be women.

It’s true that as a pedestrian, I experience more rudeness from women drivers than from men (the exception is the male driver executing a turn while talking on the cell phone – guaranteed obliviousness). In general I can make book that when the driver fails to give me a helpful signal, fails to brake when the car in the curb lane has already stopped for me, or fails to look to the right when making a turn on red, unless a cell phone is involved, the driver will be female.

But that’s not about genitalia. It’s not about who the driver played with as a child. It’s about the driver’s approach to driving which in turn is driven by how the car is used.

I have a stonemason friend – very masculine – who uses his truck almost exclusively for short hops to jobs and to run his single-parent household. He drives like a woman.

Another friend is a total girl (the most feminine straight guy I know), but he only uses his car for his long commute or travel. He drives like a guy.

Or consider the jokes about Asian drivers. A lot like women driver humor. And consider, culturally, how that group has tended to use cars.

Just considering…