Mind Moves: Ask any male taxi driver about who lets whom out of a side road and he will probably tell you that "the worst are women".
"Women will never let you out of anywhere," say taxi drivers. Whether it is from a gateway or side road, or two lanes that have suddenly converged into one, women, according to men, will never give way.
The complaints continue. Women are terrible for changing lanes without signalling. They will always edge into the yellow box if they think that you might use it to get out or ahead of them. They do not yield on roundabouts. They delay leaving a parking space if they think you want it. They jam their brakes on unexpectedly and are indignant when you let them know.
But most of all, male taxi drivers suggest that women harden their faces, avert their eyes and pretend they don't see you so that they don't have to give you right of way.
And what happens when these taxi drivers big-heartedly give way to women? Do they smile in gratitude, wave appreciation or flash their lights to say thank you? "No," say the male taxi drivers. They do not say thank you or acknowledge your existence; women simply barge out in a peremptory manner, as if possession of the road is their right.
And this opinion of women drivers does not appear to be confined to taxi drivers, as you may find if you conduct your own informal research among the men you know.
This is a somewhat startling vox pop survey outcome. It is not palatable. It is not the perception one wishes to have of one's own gender.
Of course, the first time a taxi driver tells you about women drivers, it is possible to dismiss it as the isolated experience of that one driver, who, given the amount of time spent on the roads, is likely to happen upon the occasional unkind female. But when the complaint is repeated by many taxi drivers, one has to accord some status to it. Or at least to question if it could, possibly, be true.
They cannot all have encountered the same woman, for taxi drivers traverse the entire State. They are presumably not in collusion with each other. Their views are not biased by age: the taxi drivers questioned represented a wide age range, some young, others semi-retired.
Their annoyance was not just with one age group of women, it was with women in general.
Indeed, the more one tried to rationalise this as the unique observation of one driver about the behaviour of a singular other, the more the circumstantial evidence pointed to this being the experience of numerous taxi drivers about the ingratitude of many road users of a particular gender. The search for exceptions found more exemplars.
Could this be so? Does one, therefore, at the expense of one's own gender, have to concede that some women behave in discourteous ways on the road? And, if so, why?
Whatever the source of the complaints, the veracity of the accounts or the extent of the experiences - be they reality or simply the taxi drivers' perceptions of the situation - the belief that "women are the worst" when it comes to common driver courtesy seems to be a strongly held belief by a substantial number of regular motorists, whose very livelihoods derive from driving along the roads.
Of course, randomly asking taxi drivers one encounters is not a reliable, valid replicable, research design. Without a well-designed large-scale formal survey, one cannot know what significance, statistical or otherwise, these observations may have.
Maybe men notice when women drive badly more than they notice when members of their own gender do it. Or maybe they notice only those women who are discourteous and pay no heed to considerate female drivers.
Without methodologically sound quantitative research, one cannot definitively, objectively affirm these male taxi drivers' complaints about women on the road.
Of course, the obvious next step is to consult female taxi drivers - those who have equal experience of road travel - as to their views on drivers in general and gender differences, if any, in driver behaviour.
Doing so produces interesting results.
"They are the worst," the first female taxi driver interviewee says. "Yes, men are absolutely the worst" when it comes to speeding and overtaking despite single white lines down the middle of the road, poor visibility and adverse conditions.
Men might let you out of a side road but dare you drive faster than they do and you will soon see the rear end of their cars.
So what are we to make of this? Do men speed because women thwart their attempts to move or do women block them when they can stop them, because they speed?
Do people drive well or badly depending upon a million variables and we notice only what is relevant to us? Are research questions selected to affirm what we suspect? Can our questions ever be objective and our answers more than biased perceptions?
Can we really know what happens between men and women on the road? Perhaps the issue is to be left alone before it drives us to distraction!
Marie Murray is director of psychology, St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview.