Why women pay more at the wheel

The offer at the driving school was quite clear: a fixed fee of 665 euros for male students and 850 for female ones, including as many driving lessons as necessary. A woman who was comparing prices at various driving schools in Zaragoza ran into this special deal for 18- to 22-year-olds, and decided to do something about it.

In early November, she went over to the Aragón Consumers Union to complain. The association checked the claim, and found the same offer at 18 driving schools in the city, all belonging to the companies Cromax, Las Fuentes and Zaragoza and working in partnership with the Royal Automobile Club of Catalonia (RACC). The promotion has been available since June.

Is this sexism? Is it discrimination? It is all that and it is also illegal, according to Laura Seara, the acting secretary of state for equality issues. Meanwhile, the consumer union has taken the matter up with the regional government consumers department, which in turn brought it to the attention of state authorities.

Women need 50 percent more classes than men, says one school owner

"We cannot discriminate. This is straight out of the last century"

But Carlos Bricio, president of the Zaragoza Driving Schools Association and the owner of some of the offending establishments, continues to support the initiative. In a telephone interview, he said that they decided to make the distinction between men and women because their data shows that the latter need more lessons before passing the national examination. In fact, according to his calculations women need 50 percent more practical classes than men; and even so, their fee was "only" 30 percent higher, he said in his own defense.

Bricio says they acted on the strength of "statistics, not discrimination." Yet there are no credible figures to prove that women have any more trouble than men obtaining their driver's license. The Spanish traffic authority, the Dirección General de Tráfico (DGT), is the only agency that knows how many times candidates try out for their permit, and a spokesman said they had no figures on the number of lessons taken.

"I neither understand it nor agree with it," said José Miguel Báez, president of the National Confederation of Driving Schools, in connection with the "everything included" offer at the Zaragoza schools. "It is not a common practice in our sector to differentiate customers by gender. We cannot discriminate. They've screwed up. They're proposing something straight out of the last century."

Báez also ventured an explanation: the economic crisis that the sector is going through has drastically reduced the number of students, and may have pushed these schools to make discriminatory offers in their search for clients.

"We wanted to help young people, who are suffering high levels of unemployment because of the crisis," said Bricio. "That's why we offered them a closed, inexpensive deal. We also have different rates for people 29 and over, and nobody complains about that."

Bricio also complains that statements of his that were published in EL PAÍS on Tuesday made him sound like a male chauvinist. He claims he is nothing of the sort. "Little boys play with cars, little girls play with dolls. It's normal that driving should come easier to the boys. It's not my fault that parents buy dolls for their girls and cars for their boys," he was reported as saying.

Báez, the veteran chief of the national confederation, said that given equal preparation, men and women pass their driver's exam at equal rates. The average number of lessons per student ranges between 30 and 35, although in recent times students have been taking fewer.

The only difference he sees is that women tend to pass the theoretical part of the exam before the men "because they study more," while men pass their practical exam sooner because they've typically already had a few unofficial lessons from relatives or friends before attending driving school.

Bricio would agree with that. "Women, unlike men, tend to sign up without any previous knowledge of driving," he said.

Over at the DGT, nobody will talk about gender differences at the wheel, and they insist that they have never disclosed figures on how many times either sex tries out for the permit before actually obtaining it. The numbers that the DGT does make public show that in the five years that the points-based license has been in effect, 79 percent of drivers who lost at least one point were men, even though they only hold 60 percent of the country's permits.

When it comes to accidents, men also fare worse. Male drivers (15.5 million of them) have a much higher accident rate than women (10.3 million). Last year, 1,360 men died at the wheel, compared with 150 women, according to the DGT. As for serious injuries, the male to female ratio was 6,303 to 1,095. In the case of slight injuries, men were overrepresented once more.

It is this statistical difference that leads some companies to offer women cheaper car insurance, at least in certain circumstances. It is a European-wide practice, although it will probably not last very much longer. The EU Court of Justice ruled last March that taking gender into account when calculating policies constitutes discrimination, and must be phased out by December 21, 2012. "That differentiation by gender was an exception in the European directive for non-discrimination," said a spokesperson for Unespa, the insurance company association. Insurers are now awaiting guidelines from the European Commission to begin implementing the court decision.

That same ruling also affects the Zaragoza driving schools. "It establishes that you cannot treat comparable situations differently, nor can you treat different situations identically, unless you are following objective considerations," said state secretary Laura Seara. "Driving schools contravene that ruling, as well as the 2004 European directive on equal treatment in access to goods and services."

Additionally, the offer goes against two Spanish laws from 2003, said Seara. "It is an illegal offer no matter how you look at it." Seara recommended that women who paid the fee take the matter to the Aragonese courts.

Meanwhile, the RACC called the promotion "unfortunate" but "unprecedented" and said it would continue to partner with the schools. The offer, however, has been eliminated. At one of the schools, a 21-year-old student named Inés said she had not been offered the gender-specific deal. "Here we are, asking for a little bit of equality, and they come up with these things," she said.

"If we made a mistake, we apologize," added Bricio.