Why women’s personal injury cases may be different
It may be surprising to know that gender biases exist in personal injury cases, but they do. Accidents that men and women experience may be relatively similar, but the amount each receives in damages can often be very different. We will learn why today.
Differences in Injuries
Men and women are physically different, and this leads to differences in the types of injuries they receive during car collisions. Biochemical research found that a woman’s posture, seat belt design or seating position can make her more susceptible to injury than men. This tends to result in more injuries to women’s spinal cords and lower extremities.
Women are also more likely to experience whiplash injuries, and these injuries can result in long-term neck or back pain. Unfortunately, whiplash injuries are seen as minor injuries, but this is not always the case. Whiplash injuries that women experience can lead to long-term, chronic pain and lower a woman’s quality of life. When these factors are dismissed, it leads to many women being undercompensated.
Differences in Compensation for Future Wage Loss
When it comes time to negotiate for the loss of future earning potential, personal injury attorneys request monetary compensation. This can add the largest sum of money to the damages that are awarded, but there is often bias. Personal injury attorneys call expert witnesses to testify on this subject, and these experts consider several biases in their calculations.
For example, experts take the victim’s gender, the victim’s educational attainment levels, the victim’s parents’ educational attainment levels, special skills and race into consideration. This leads to larger monetary awards for men because men earn more money over their lifetimes than women in most cases. Adding these factors into their calculations causes experts to suggest larger sums of money for men than women. Experts have even stated that a Caucasian female high school graduate would receive $694,000, but a Caucasian male high school graduate would receive $1.2 million in damages.
Differences in Compensation for Emotional Distress
More women suffer from psychological distress and emotional difficulties after trauma than men do. For example, many women are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD after being injured in an accident, so personal injury attorneys must not allow the negotiation process to ignore these claims.
In addition to that, more women go into shock during a less severe car accident than a man does. This means that women’s blood flow decreases and causes their organs to fail in accidents that would not elicit the same reaction in men. Because women’s heart rates and blood pressure were elevated during trauma experiences, experts believe that a woman’s body will respond differently from a man’s body.
Why Hiring a Personal Injury Attorney Is in a Woman’s Best Interests
Because of the biases we have described above, women must not fail to hire their own personal injury attorneys after accidents. In many cases, insurers deny that women are experiencing the level of pain that they claim they are experiencing, but a good attorney can argue against this bias in negotiations or court proceedings. This increases the likelihood that women will receive the monetary compensation that they are entitled to receive.
Proving that gender-specific injuries are real requires advanced legal strategies. An attorney must enlist experts, such as economists, accident reconstruction experts and medical specialists during the negotiations or trial. These experts will be instrumental in demonstrating how the accident occurred and how the plaintiff’s injuries are going to affect her long-term well-being, earning capacity and mobility.