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Notes -
My guess would be that this is responsible for a lot of it, as an artifact of the likely reality (citation needed) that when a man and a woman are traveling together in a car with one of them driving, the majority of the time and distance involve the man driving and, as such, the woman is the one more often in the position to back/side-seat drive. The reason for this phenomena are likely many, including that men are more incentivized to take the lead and responsibility, especially in romantic relationships and that men are more likely to be the richer one and therefore more likely to be the car owner in the case that they're romantic partners. I'd also guess that men are more likely than women not to consider driving to be a burden.
There's also the fact that men tend to have higher risk tolerance, and so driving behavior that he considers reasonable could be considered dangerous by her more often than the other way around.
If there's any particular real difference in behavior, I'd guess that it's because women are incentivized by society to direct men to solve their problems in a way that men aren't incentivized to direct women - or other men - to solve theirs. But I don't know how much is left over to explain after my first 2 paragraphs above.
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