BMC Public Health 2004, 4:54 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/4/54 Table 2: The number of active participants* by gender on Fridays the 13th, the previous (the 6th) and following (the 20th) Fridays. Total 299.5 317 299 Drivers 193.5 198 183 Pedestrians and Bicyclists 106 119 116 Total 713.5 824 748.5 Pedestrians and Bicyclists 95.5 119 87 * Active participants included drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians who actively control their motion in traffic and may get involved in crashes. Table 3: The number of victims* by gender on Fridays the 13th, the previous (the 6th) and following (the 20th) Fridays. * Numbers for victims refer to active participants while those in parenthesis also include passengers. Male Drivers 618 705 661.5 Male Injured 196 (290.5) 214 (304) 195.5 (296) Dead 27.5 (33.5) 30 (35) 22.5 (25) Injured 308.5 (372) 340 (430) 329.5 (418.5) Friday 6th 13th 20th Friday 6th 13th 20th Female Female Dead 6 (9)* 15 (21) 11 (13) ipTFnrhijgeuecureyardvereionr1agadgaencrdaafsiohlylelonswubmiynbgeFrnrdoidefaraycostnfivoterhpe1a9Fr8rt9idc–iap2ya0sn01t2s3tinhvaonlvdetdhein The average daily number of active participants involved in injury road crashes by gender on the Fridays 13th and the preceding and following Fridays for 1989–2002. for each Friday of each triplet, and applied the Friedman test to check whether this ratio is systematically higher on Fridays 13th, as expected from Näyhä's [7] results. The ratio was quite similar on each Friday (6th: 0.420, 13th: 0.385, 20th: 0.452; χ2 = 0.400, df = 2, p = 0.819) indicat- ing that, with respect to men, women are not overrepre- sented in crashes that occur on Fridays 13th. The odds for women being involved in an injury tend to be even some- what smaller on Friday 13th. There was no such overrep- resentation in injured (χ2 = 1.615, df = 2, p = 0.446) or dead (χ2 = 2.1, df = 2, p = 0.350) women among active participants. Finally, we similarly checked a possible Gender × Day effect in legally responsible crashes (responsibility drawn from police reports), computing female/male ratios of guilty participants for each day and triplet, but did not found any effect(Friedman test, χ2 = 0.514, df = 2, p = 0.774). Discussion This study could not find any indication of overrepresen- tation of women in injury crashes on Friday the 13th. This is inconsistent with Näyhä's [7] results and conclusions that were based on less numerous deaths statistics (41 women died in all traffic accidents on Fridays 13th 1971– 97) compared to injury road traffic accidents (317 active female participants on Fridays 13th 1989–2002), and also inconsistent with earlier British results [4]. Given that women's more frequent superstition and related anxiety would cause unsafe traffic behaviour, injury accidents should increase on Friday the 13th as well as fatalities. This was definitely not the case in the Finnish road acci- dent statistics. Although injury accidents are not reported Page 3 of 4 (page number not for citation purposes)