It's a bit more complicated than that, not that the article you're responding to is particularly nuanced itself. The overall goal is to improve material and phy

It's a bit more complicated than that, not that the article you're responding to is particularly nuanced itself. The overall goal is to improve material and physical well-being for society in aggregate (itself a bit ambiguous, but bear with me). Suppose cars being optimized for the male case would minimize overall injuries. That will have the side effect, however, of dissuading women from driving at the margin, compared to a world where cars are optimized for some intermediate case. That's deadweight loss, and deadweight loss has a real economic and social cost. In the extreme, you could imagine a world where there's a net increase of one death in exchange for generating billions of dollars. In that non-realized world, that'd be an obvious trade off worth making. Of course, with that different safety optimization target we'd then have loss when the marginal male driver chooses not to drive. Do they cancel out? At least if we're starting from a male-optimized point, small changes in safety policies are likely to lead to minimal loss of male drivers (by definition of optima; linear terms are zero in the vicinity of a local optimum). At that male-focused optimum, however, female drivers can potentially drive large social gains by small changes in safety policy in their favor (since the safety policy is not already optimized for them). Which is all to say, what's socially ideal is likely somewhere between male-optimized and female-optimized, though not necessarily near the exact midpoint. And that's all assuming that car driving currently is currently male-optimized, which I'd question.