Women in driving seat in Russia's road revolution

At a disused airfield on the outskirts of Moscow, Yekaterina Karenina hits the accelerator of her BMW and speeds past a row of broken, faded military jets.

A quick jolt of the steering wheel with her well-manicured fingers flicks the car deftly through a 360-degree spin before accelerating off again. For $500, Russia's women drivers can pay Karenina to teach them the same trick in a country where females behind the wheel are still a relative novelty.

"Fifteen to 25 years ago, there were no female drivers in Russia," said Natalya Lipatova, the editor of "Women at the Wheel", a new monthly magazine for female drivers. "There was only one car in the family and that belonged to the husband, the brother or the father and they did all the driving.

Now many more women can afford their own car." There are about 142 million people living in Russia and roughly 2 million female drivers this year, almost 50 percent more than in 2001, according to marketing group TNS-Gallup.

Women cashing in on Russia's oil-fuelled economic resurgence and buying their own cars face an array of hazards on the road network, often little improved since Soviet times.

Congested highways

Rusting Russian-made Ladas, sleek black Mercedes and dilapidated goods trucks swerve, speed and thunder along the Russian capital's heavily congested highways in a blare of horns.

Crashes are common and at any moment a traffic policeman may flag a vehicle down, ostensibly to check documents a common ruse to extract a petty bribe.

"When you sit inside the car you should lock the doors and, of course, tinted windows are better as other people can't see who is driving."

Knowledge gap

Lipatova's new magazine also aims to help fill the knowledge gap for novice women drivers. "When a woman sits behind the wheel of a car, she enters another world," Lipatova, a 36-year-old sporting a red leather jacket, told Reuters. "Women at the Wheel" will show readers how to smoothly reverse park their car then step gracefully from the driver's seat on to the pavement.

September's first edition carried articles on how to adjust the driver's seat correctly, as well as what to carry in the glove compartment - nail polish and hand cream among other items - and what to wear. Car insurance companies in Russia have begun to mimic their counterparts in Western Europe and offer women special packages.

Whereas in the West companies offer women a discount as statistics show they are less likely to have accidents, in Russia this trend is not repeated, said Elnur Suleymanov, head of sales at Rosno, one of Russia's largest insurers.

"The difference is in the size of the damage. Women drive slower than men and have less damage in a crash, but they crash more often," he said.

Casual prejudices against women drivers survive on Moscow's streets. Two men lounging in a black Russian-built Volga waved this reporter away with a typically gruff comment: "Dangerous. They should not be allowed on the road." But drivers such as Svetlana Mikhailova are not bothered by these attitudes. "It's all about independence," she said after parking her black saloon outside a flower shop in central Moscow. There was a large dent in a front wing.

Mikhailova, 34, has been driving for nine years and considers herself as something of a pioneer. She remembers what men thought when she started to drive. "They were astonished," she said.

(Reuters)