The U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration updated a 2013 study on the risk of female death rates compared to male death rates in vehicle collisions with similar physical effects.

The new paper, titled Female Crash Fatality Risk Relative to Males for Similar Physical Impacts, is currently available online, according to an Aug. 16 NHTSA news report.

“Advancing equity, including across our transportation system, is one of the Biden-Harris administration’s top priorities,” NHTSA Administrator Dr. Steven Cliff said in the release. “While NHTSA’s new report shows significant declines in differences in crash outcomes between women and men, there is more work required to eliminate any disparities that remain.”

The new analysis suggests automobiles from model year 2000 onward have a much lower estimated difference in female fatality risk compared to male fatality risk, with the difference shrinking as the vehicle gets newer, the release reported. The overall disparity decreases from 18% to 6.3% for automobiles built between 2010 and 2015, and to 2.9% for automobiles built between 2015 and 2020.

The study also discovered that, in collisions involving cars included in the study built between 1960 and 2009, less than a third of occupants wore seat belts, according to the release. Nearly 83% of automobile passengers in automobiles built between 2010 and 2020 had their seatbelts fastened.