Liz Flanders, a senior at Conestoga Valley High School, said she doesn't think she drives "like a girl."

She was referring to the stereotype of the teenage girl driver as more cautious and less aggressive than her male counterpart.

It's a stereotype that may be fading.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, some major auto insurers are raising the rates they charge to cover teenage girls, "reflecting the crumbling of conventional wisdom" that young women are more responsible drivers than young men.

In Pennsylvania, auto insurers have not been permitted since 1988 to set rates according to gender. Some women have felt that this unisex rating was unfair, as data indicates that "young male drivers are at greater risk than young female drivers," said Rosanne Placey, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Insurance Department.

But an Allstate Foundation survey of teen drivers indicates that girls are taking risks behind the wheel and exhibiting the kind of aggressiveness that used to be associated with boys.

Like speed
Nearly half of the girls surveyed admitted they are likely to drive more than 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, compared to 36 percent of boys. Sixteen percent of girls described their driving as aggressive, up from 9 percent in 2005.

Fifty-one percent of girls said they are likely to use a cell phone to talk, text or e-mail while driving, compared to 38 percent of boys. And 84 percent of girls said they are likely to adjust music selection or volume while driving, compared to 69 percent of boys.

Young women "are taking on more risks in all aspects of their lives," one Allstate Insurance Co. executive told the Wall Street Journal, suggesting that this assertiveness may be translating to girls' driving habits.

Liz Flanders said she certainly isn't timid about driving at the speed limit, or about passing other cars, when passing is permitted. "I'm a good driver," she said, self-assuredly.

As she spoke, other Conestoga Valley High School students — eager to start their Memorial Day holiday weekend — streamed out of school. Students made their way to their cars in the student parking lot; the campus, so quiet just moments before, erupted with tooting car horns, exuberant laughter and shouted goodbyes.

Victoria Forney, a senior, said she thinks it's impossible to generalize about the driving behaviors of girls and boys. "You see such a variety," she said.

She said she thinks there are still some differences in the ways girls and boys approach driving — boys still tend to be the ones who race, she said — but she added: "I think the lines are fading."

Scott Fitts, another senior, said he doesn't think safe driving is "a girl-guy thing." He said there are smart, responsible drivers, and then there are "dumb people."

Scott's twin brother, Paul, said he thinks texting and phoning while driving is particularly stupid and reckless. He and his friends, Tyler Morton and Abram Harnish, said they would like to see a ban on cell phone use while driving.

A bill in the state Legislature that would impose new restrictions on teen drivers would have made cell phone use by holders of junior licenses a primary offense. But last week, the state Senate passed the bill with an amendment making cell phone use by junior drivers a secondary offense.

A restriction that would have limited the number of young, unrelated passengers that a junior driver could transport also was amended by the Senate. The bill now must go back to the state House.

Support ban
Most of the Conestoga Valley students interviewed Friday said they would support a ban on cell phone use while driving. "It's probably a good idea," said Olivia Nein, a senior. "If there was a law, we couldn't do it."

But she and most of the other teens interviewed said any ban should apply to adults, too.

"Yeah, teenagers are new drivers, but who's to say I'll hit someone while texting and someone who's twice my age won't?" Liz Flanders said.

Tom Reinfried, a retired Conestoga Valley High School teacher who now works as a driving instructor for AAA Central Penn, also thinks a cell phone ban should be applied across the board.

"Driving is a complex mental activity, and all age groups cannot afford to be distracted," he said.

He said he once heard texting while driving compared to using a hair dryer while taking a bath. They're just not safe behaviors when done simultaneously, he said.

Annemarie Prozzillo, a junior at Conestoga Valley, said she never texts while driving. "When I'm on the phone, that's all I'm focused on," she said.

She was driving on Lincoln Highway East one day when a car driven by another teenage girl drifted dangerously toward her. The other girl was using her cell phone. The incident convinced Prozzillo that she shouldn't text and drive.

"No one should be on their cell phone while driving," said Logan Norris, a junior at Conestoga Valley. "The car's like a weapon — you could kill someone."

 Norris said she doesn't consider music a distraction when she's driving. She said she knows where the buttons are located on her MP3 player, so she doesn't need to look at it when she changes her music.

 She said that "under certain conditions, I tend to drive fast." But she added: "I still think girls drive more carefully."

Olivia Nein said she thinks teenagers in general can be impatient drivers. "I feel like we're more in a hurry," she said, adding, "We don't tolerate slow drivers anymore."

Dick Hibshman, a former Penn Manor High School driver education teacher who now has his own driving school, said he has noticed that more girls are driving fast these days.

"If I'm on the freeway, and someone comes up behind me, wanting me to go faster ... it's often a teenage girl," he said.

He said that young drivers, male and female, tend to think that nothing bad is going to happen to them when they're driving. For the same reason, he said, they may insist they can drive while using their cell phones.

He doesn't see boys texting as much, he said. "With girls, they're walking and talking, and they get in the car and start it up, and they're still on that phone," he said.

He said he tells all of his students that they're driving a "3,000-pound missile, and it's not as easy to drive as you think ... It takes 100 percent concentration."

Girls listen
Timothy Wissler, a longtime driver education teacher at Solanco High School, said he thinks that young females still tend to be "slower, careful and more deliberate drivers than males." And as students, he said, "they listen — they really lock into what you're saying."

It may be true, however, that "girls are less patient" behind the wheel than in the past, he said, noting, "We are a McDonald's society … We want everything quick."

John Mumma, owner of A Safe Way Driving School LLC, said he still has to "slow boys down more than girls."

But he said that "about an equal ratio of girls and boys" insist to him that they are allowed to drive 5 miles per hour over the speed limit before they will be stopped by the police.

"I've had girls who are right in there with the boys, who are just a little too fearless," Mumma said, noting, "They're not arrogant or dangerous, but they'll make me work harder to slow them down."

Driving instructor Tom Reinfried said that because girls are driving more than girls once did, "and they have access to cars, and the car gives them power, they like the lead foot just as much as boys do.

"They're no different than the rest of our society. In our society today, we don't want to slow down. We want to zoom, zoom, zoom."

Reinfried said "the dynamic of girls driving cars has changed considerably" over the decades. He said that girls no longer are shrinking violets. "They're expected to not be passive," he said, noting that for them, as for boys, "driving is a form of expression."

Moreover, it used to be that teens, male and female, would get their license at age 16, and then would have to share the family car. If they did drive to school, they often took younger siblings with them.

Now, teens have their own cars. In some families with multiple siblings, each sibling has a car, and the siblings drive separately because they all have different school activities and jobs, and none of them wants to be relegated to taking the school bus.

"We're seeing more and more girls on the road driving to school, to their jobs, whereas years ago, they might not have been on the road as much," Reinfried said, adding, "They just have more opportunities to demonstrate some more aggressive driving behaviors."

Reinfried said that teen drivers, both male and female, tend to see risks "as something that old people take."

"Kids are notorious for perceiving the dangers in others that they don't see in themselves," he said.

This is borne out by the Allstate survey of teen drivers.

Sixty-five percent of teens said they are confident in their own driving skills, but 77 percent said they have felt unsafe with another teen's driving.

Only 23 percent of teens agreed that most teens are good drivers.

And only 59 percent said they would speak up if they were "scared or uncomfortable as a passenger." Fifty-three percent of girls said they would speak up, compared to 66 percent of boys.

When he taught driver education at Conestoga Valley, Reinfried said he would tell his students that one in five Americans in any given year would be involved in a car crash.

He then would ask his students to write a list of five kids in their class who they foresaw being in a crash. He would instruct the students not to share those names with each other.

"They never put their own name down," he said, noting, "Kids always feel that the one in five is going to be somebody else."

He then would ask students how many of them planned to drive with any of the five kids whose names they'd written down.

"Their hands would all go up," Reinfried said.

So even though the students believed they knew who was going to present a higher risk, "they were still willing to drive with that person," he said.