YOU'RE SITTING in your car, about to pull onto a roundabout. You're just waiting for a gap in the traffic. As you start to move onto the roundabout, a powerful car overtakes you from behind, tearing round the roundabout, tyres screaming.

How do you feel? Perhaps it depends on whether the driver actually hit you or not. Their impatience has caused you possibly a shock, but almost certainly anger. Do you follow him down the road hurling abuse through the windscreen, driving faster than you should so that you can do the same to him at the next roundabout?

Road rage has had a big press recently, with Jason Humble receiving a prison sentence for fatally pushing into the path of an oncoming car a Fiesta driver and his girlfriend because: "They were holding me up. They were driving at 35 in a 40 mile-an-hour limit. I just wanted to get past." What killed Humble's victims was not some new psychological condition but a combination of emotions which has afflicted drivers since driving began: impatience and aggression. A dangerous duo.

The image associated with road rage is of two angry men with a couple of big fast cars, shouting at each other, even coming to blows. But it isn't a syndrome that affects exclusively men. Nowadays, women can be just as aggressive behind the steering wheel.

As a female driver, I've tried for years to live down the traditional "bad lady driver" image. Of course women have more sense than men, I told myself, they wouldn't risk their lives, and especially wouldn't risk the lives of their children, who are more often chauffeured by mothers than fathers. The insurance industry was beginning to agree with me, with discounts offered to insure cars driven solely by women.

But as space on the roads becomes ever more at a premium, and a generation of women who have always driven reach an age when they too want bigger and faster cars, are women showing just as much road rage as men?

I didn't think so until I found myself yelling across a car park at a woman driver who'd just overtaken me in a move I considered extremely dangerous. As I made to follow her inside the building, overloaded with anger, I realised that what I was feeling had to be called road rage.

"You weren't going to move - I was watching you closely!" said Melanie Saunders, driver of a large Mitsubishi Shogun with a personalised number plate. She'd been held up in a traffic queue and drove several car lengths on the wrong side of the road to get into a car park. My Renault Clio was the car in front (I was aiming for the same car park), and the manoeuvre scared me silly. The driver in the oncoming car who found himself facing the Shogun head-on no doubt felt equally jittery after he braked.

Although this incident ended in some rather unladylike exchanges, there was luckily no accident. Such an accident could have had serious consequences not only for Saunders and the other drivers, but also her three small children who were in the car at the time. For the sake of what, two minutes, max.?

Overtaking on the right may seem a minor example, but Mary Graham recalls the car crash in which her Nissan Micra was written off: "I was indicating right, and waiting for a cyclist to clear the entranced to the car park. When I started turning, a Fiesta overtook me on the right and took the right front wing with him. I was sitting there stunned and the driver stormed back down the road and started to abuse me. I was terrified he was going to beat me up."

The Fiesta driver, Ron Underwood, insisted "I thought she was parked on the left and indicating to move out." Graham's car was directly opposite the entrance to a side road. PC Smith, who charged Underwood with driving without due care and attention, admitted "We've wanted to get our hands on this one for a long time." The route Underwood took to get home every day took him right past the front door of the police station. His driving style had long been noted.

The villain that time was a man, but women are now driving just as aggressively. Impatient young men, business drivers, taxi-drivers, somehow you expect sometimes dangerous driving from them. But why would mothers, who are normally paranoid about safety, get so impatient to get the children to school that they risk their lives?

So, tell me you're not like that... Yet how many times have you broken the speed limit to overtake a slow-moving car, only to find yourself just a car length in front at the next traffic lights?

Tell that story to anyone and they'll say "Oh, there's nothing wrong in trying to save a few minutes on a journey. It's petty to criticise." But Graham ruefully points out that it cost her over £5000 to replace her Micra -- even though the insurance companies ruled in her favour. Sarah Cowan (36) who was rear-ended on a suburban road ten years ago, still needs physiotherapy every two days to cope with the pain of whiplash. She as awarded just £1000 by an insurance tribunal.

If you've got a fast and powerful car - whatever your sex - it's often tempting to out-drive smaller cars, whatever the current road conditions and speed limits. Yours may be a flashy Porsche proving you can beat the next car at the lights, or a huge 4x4 on the school run pushing your way through the queues.

Whatever, accidents are caused by impatience. Do you really think it will never be you?

Helen Whitehead