Men at Work…Unsafely: Gender Differences in Compliance with Safety Regulations in the Trucking Industry

Abstract

Although safety within operational systems depends on compliance with regulations, non-compliance is common in many settings. Trucking is a meaningful industry for studying operational safety compliance given that the industry is large and important, truck accidents kill thousands annually, and such accidents collectively cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars. Although the truck driving occupation is dominated by men, significant efforts are underway to recruit more women into the profession. If women are safer behind the wheel than men, increasing their ranks could improve overall safety compliance. Building on theory and evidence suggesting that men have a greater willingness to take risky actions and break rules, we used data on 22 million truck inspections from 2010 to 2022 to identify an operational safety compliance gap between men and women truckers. Overall, men were 7.4% more likely to be cited for a major violation of rules governing working hours (known as hours-of-service or HOS rules) and 13.2% more likely to have a major unsafe driving violation. We then examined whether gap changes based on carrier size and type. We found that the HOS compliance gap is smaller for small carriers (vs. large) and private carriers (vs. for-hire), but not the unsafe driving gap. Finally, we tested whether the introduction of an intervention—electronic logging devices (ELDs) that automatically record truckers’ driving hours—closes the gap by increasing men's compliance. In line with predictions, differences between men and women disappeared after the mandate; but again, only for HOS compliance. Surprisingly, women had significantly more HOS violations in 2021 and 2022 than men—an outcome that may be tied to women truckers’ personal safety issues. In summary, the results and additional robustness checks indicate that men committed more unsafe driving violations (e.g., speeding) than women across the entire study period, while the pattern of HOS violations varied based on external events. We conclude by highlighting possible pathways for reducing the number of collisions involving trucks and thus lowering the number of fatalities and extent of economic losses.