While women are more likely to be injured in a frontal automobile crash, according to Consumer Reports, the crash test dummy used in vehicle tests by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration dates back to the 1970s and is still modeled almost entirely off the body of a man.

The NHTSA has the final word on whether cars get pulled from the market and the kind of dummy used in its safety tests could impact which ones receive coveted five-star ratings.

“It seems like we have an easy solution here where we can have crash test dummies that reflect an average woman as well as a man,” Sen. Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican who has introduced legislation the past two sessions that would require the NHTSA to incorporate a more advanced female dummy into its testing, told The Associated Press.

Senators from both parties have signed onto Fischer’s “She Drives Act,” and the transportation secretaries from the past two presidential administrations have expressed support for updating the rules.

For various reasons, the push for new safety requirements has been moving at a sluggish pace. That’s particularly true in the United States, where much of the research is happening and where around 40,000 people are killed each year in car crashes.

The crash test dummy currently used in NHTSA five-star testing is called the Hybrid III, which was developed in 1978 and modeled after a 5-foot-9, 171-pound man (the average size in the 1970s but about 29 pounds lighter than today’s average). What’s known as the female dummy is essentially a much smaller version of the male model with a rubber jacket to represent breasts. It’s routinely tested in the passenger seat or the back seat but seldom in the driver’s seat, even though the majority of licensed drivers are women.

“What they didn’t do is design a crash test dummy that has all the sensors in the areas where a woman would be injured differently than a man,” said Christopher O’Connor, president and CEO of the Farmington Hills, Mich.-based Humanetics Group, which has spent more than a decade developing and refining one.

A female dummy from Humanetics equipped with all of the available sensors costs around $1 million, about twice the cost of the Hybrid used now.

O’Connor said the more expensive dummy far more accurately reflects the anatomical differences between the sexes, including in the shape of the neck, collarbone, pelvis and legs, which one NHTSA study found account for about 80 percent more injuries by women in a car crash compared to men.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry trade group, said in a statement to the AP that the better way to ensure safety — which it called its top priority — is through upgrades to the existing Hybrid dummy rather than mandating a new one.

“This can happen on a faster timeline and lead to quicker safety improvements than requiring NHTSA to adopt unproven crash test dummy technology,” the alliance said.