Mirror, mascara, massacre
Oct 2nd, 2009 by handolio
Interesting bit of journalism in the Telegraph today. And by interesting I mean rubbish.
The paper’s got a story based on a press release from Diamond, a car insurance company that specialises in insuring women. At the time of writing, the article’s standfirst reads:
“Nearly half a million road accidents a year are caused by women drivers applying make-up behind the wheel, a new survey discloses.”
There are three problems with that single paragraph.
First, about 4,000 drivers were polled. There are clearly many more female drivers in the country, so the UK-wide figure is a significant extrapolation. As such, the survey only ‘suggests’, not ‘discloses’ it.
Next is the half a million figure – which is in the paper but not in the version of the press release I have. I think it’s calculated by multiplying an insurance industry figure provided in the release (15 million women drivers in the UK) by the ‘more than 3%’ of respondents who said they had crashed their car as a result of applying lipstick, to arrive at 450,000+. Hardly a robust calculation, based on what roughly 120 women said in a survey.
The final, most significant problem is the time frame. At no point does the original release say ‘per year’ – it’s talking about whether women drivers have ever applied make-up at the wheel.
In 2008, police recorded 170,591 road accidents where someone was killed or injured. You could reasonably guess that, with 30 million-odd vehicles on the roads there’s maybe a million or two accidents in total each year, very roughly half of which will be the fault of a woman.
I’ve applied an advanced journalistic technique to help me conclude that, whatever the Telegraph tells you, make-up is unlikely to account for 50-100% of all the annual accidents involving women motorists: it’s called common sense.
DISCLAIMER - Diamond are part of the Admiral group, an iCrossing client. I have a pre-final copy of the press release which contains none of the errors. The Mirror has the story all wrong, too, suggesting a newswire may be responsible for ‘half million per year’.
At the risk of sounding like someone who *gives a shit* about PR – and people often mistake me for someone who does – I can’t help asking this question: who thought it would be a good way to attract the attention of (safer than men, in general) women drivers by making them sound like make-up obsessed idiots who crash their cars all the time because they, like, care more about looking pretty than not killing their fellow road users (or themselves)?
It comes to something when even Easier.com are more accurate than the – still uncorrected – Telegraph.
Women Driving? What? Pretty Soon they’ll want to vote too.
http://doodiepants.com/2009/10/09/women-driving-pretty-soon-they-will-want-to-vote/