Women are NOT "73% more likely to suffer fatal injuries in a car accident due to safety procedures in cars being designed for men".

Some feminists claim that "women are 73% more likely to suffer fatal injuries in a car accident due to safety procedures in cars being designed for men". This is false. Let us see why.

According to page 4 of ICRP (International Commission on Radiological Protection) Publication 23 — Report on the Task Group on Reference Man (1975), the Reference Man is defined as follows:

Reference Man is defined as being between 20-30 years of age, weighing 70 kg, is 170 cm in height, and lives in a climate with an average temperature of from 10° to 20°C. He is Caucasian and isp a Western European or North American in habitat and custom.

Note that there is no explicit mention of gender, except for the use of generic masculine nouns and pronouns.

Average heights did not change significantly since the Reference Man was designed, so we can rely on recent data. Since the Reference Man was at the time designed with Caucasians in mind, notwithstanding whether this was a good choice or not, we will look at the average heights of Caucasian men and women. According to pages 13 and 15 Anthropometric Reference Data for Children and Adults: United States, 2015–2018 (CDC, 2021), Caucasian US men of age 20 and over are on average 176.7 cm large, while Caucasian US women of age 20 and over are on average 162.4 cm large.

Now let's average the average heights of women and men in the US: (176.7 cm + 162.4 cm ) ÷ 2 = 169.55 cm. As we can see, with 170 cm the "Reference Man" is about the average of Caucasian US men's and women's average height.

Also note that in recent years, variations of the Reference Man were created for different body size, age, sex, and race.

Then you have some articles claim that women suffer from higher fatality and injury rates than men. What they fail to mention is that this does not take into account that women crash in different situations, e.g. they tend to sit in the passenger seat and drive smaller cars. The "fact" has been repeated e.g. by The Guardian (title: "The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes") who again quote The Washington Post or by the CBC (title: "Why life-saving improvements to car safety have benefited men more than women"). However, the IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) released an article earlier this year that reads:

Women are much more likely than men to suffer a serious injury when they are involved in a crash, but much of the heightened risk is related to the types of vehicles women drive and the circumstances of their crashes, rather than physical differences, new research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows.

“Our study shows that today’s crash testing programs have helped women as much as men,” says Jessica Jermakian, IIHS vice president of vehicle research and one of the study’s authors. “That said, we found that women are substantially more likely to suffer leg injuries, which is something that will require more investigation.”

Though men are involved in more fatal crashes than women, on a per-crash basis women are 20-28 percent more likely than men to be killed and 37-73 percent more likely to be seriously injured after adjusting for speed and other factors. However, when IIHS researchers limited the comparison to similar crashes, they found those discrepancies mostly disappeared and that crashworthiness improvements have benefited men and women more or less equally.

Additionally, women more often sit in the passenger seat which increases their likelihood of suffering fatal injuries during a crash.

So yes, women do have a greater relative risk, i.e. a greater risk on a per-crash basis, of suffering fatal injuries in a car accident, but not due to discrimination. The article authors do note however that "[w]omen were still more than 2½ times as likely to suffer moderate leg injuries. They were also about 70 percent more likely than men to suffer serious leg injuries, though that figure wasn’t statistically significant" and that this is something "that will require more investigation".

But all of this factors out that men overall drive longer hours and that in absolute numbers, men suffer more from fatal car crashes:

Seventy-one percent of all motor vehicle crash deaths in 2019 were males. Males accounted for 71 percent of passenger vehicle driver deaths, 48 percent of passenger vehicle passenger deaths, 96 percent of large truck driver deaths, 67 percent of large truck passenger deaths, 70 percent of pedestrian deaths, 86 percent of bicyclist deaths, and 91 percent of motorcyclist deaths. — IIHS, 2019

In absolute numbers in passenger vehicles alone, men are almost twice as likely to suffer fatal injuries from a car crash as women are. Taking into account all motor vehicle deaths, this factor jumps up to around 2 ½.

Phrased differently: If you picked a random man and a random woman out of the population who are also going to drive / be driven in two separate cars for the same length of time in circumstances that are 'typical' for their gender, and you asked me to guess who is more likely to die in the next car crash, I would bet on the woman.

If on the other hand you picked a random man and a random woman out of the population who are also going to drive / be driven in two separate cars for the same length of time in the exact same circumstances, and you asked me to guess who is more likely to die in the next car crash, I would bet on neither.

If instead, you picked a random man and a random woman out of the population and asked me to guess who is more likely to die in a car crash over their lifetime, I would bet on the man.

Edit: As one of the commentators pointed out, crash-test dummies are not modeled after the "Reference Man".

Please have a look here instead: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/the-humble-history-of-the-crash-test-dummy/

The first crash test dummies were actually cadavers. […] There were brief forays into testing with live people and animals. Neither produced highly useful results and presented ethical dilemmas.

It wasn’t until 1949 that crash test dummies were first developed. The first dummies created served for testing aircraft ejection seats for the U.S. Air Force. Sierra Sam was the first crash test dummy, fixed to propelled sleds on rails.

The same type of dummy was later used by the automotive industry to develop shoulder harnesses and lap seat belts. […]

By 1970, concerns rose because the adult-size male dummies didn’t give the data needed on what happened to smaller child and female physiques in crashes. Restraint systems designed to protect the adult male dummies were actually causing injuries to smaller passengers, especially children.

That year a larger male dummy, named Sierra Stan, and a female model named Sierra Susie came along. The same year saw them joined by Sierra Sammy, a dummy the size of a six-year-old child, and Sierra Toddler who was the size of a three-year-old.

So in short, crash test dummies used to be male only because they came out of the military (so it is understandable why they didn't have a female model), but this was corrected already in 1970.