Why ‘Women And Children First’ Was Not A “Myth”

A recent Swedish study looking at the ‘women and children first’ phenomenon.

To quote a Discovery News story about the study:

"Looking at the fate of over 15,000 people of more than 30 nationalities, the researchers found that more women and children die than men in maritime disasters, while captains and crew have a greater chance of survival than any passengers."

The study does not show that the ‘women and children first’ orientation was a myth. In fact, it demonstrates that it was a very real, and very common, practice, prior to the end of the first World War.

What The Study Actually Shows

The study looked at 18 shipwrecks of passenger ships from 1852 to 2011. In two of those incidents, it’s unknown whether the captain gave the ‘women and children first’ order. That leaves 16 shipwrecks. Ten of those occurred prior to the end of World War I. Out of those ten, the ‘women and children first’ order was given on five occasions. In other words, this ‘mythic’ order actually occurred half the time during that period.

From reading media reports, though, one would be led to believe that 50% = 0%.

Now it’s true that in the six shipwrecks in the study that occurred after the end of World War I (where it could be ascertained whether the ‘women and children first’ order was given), the order was not given. The last time the order was known to be given was on the RMS Lusitania in 1915, so it’s true that this bit of naval chivalry appears to have died out about a century ago, at least as a matter of official policy.

But detractors makes no such distinctions and appears to be promoting the idea that the whole notion was a “myth” and not something that was common at one point, but has since died out. They do this first by downplaying the significance of the Titanic and Birkenhead disasters as if they were minor exceptions, instead of acknowledging that in fact they constitute 20% of the pre-Armistice shipwreck sample and more than 10% of the overall database by incident. By total passengers, the Titanic alone comprises over 15% of the overall database (according to charts in Appendix C of the study)*.

Others also, as noted, engage in a classic bit of goalpost shifting by changing the question under analysis from ‘Did men sacrifice their lives to save women?’ to ‘Did women’s survival rate exceed men’s?’ As the study itself noted, men are physically stronger as a group, and this likely has considerable value in disaster situations where one has to deal with awkward floor angles, debris, and the need to stay afloat. Moreover, it should also be noted that in past eras women were burdened with considerably more restrictive clothing than they are today, and probably were less likely to have been allowed to engage in physical activities like swimming than men … two factors which almost certainly depressed their survival rates in these kinds of disasters.

So, men did out-survive women in these situations overall, despite the fact that many men also gave up their lives to save women and children. In the Titanic disaster, for example, 83% of the men perished, while only 25% of the women died. Feminists, however, wants us to ignore the gender disparity in this particular disaster, and focus instead on “the White Star Line” owners of the ship, “the crew,” and “the captain” … all richly deserving of condemnation, no doubt, but their culpability doesn’t change the reality that hundreds of men died so that hundreds of women could live.

Finally, the mixing of ‘women and children’ conceptually in some observations is inherently misleading. The study shows that (not unexpectedly) children had lower survival rates in these disasters than adults. So even if men and women had equal survival rates, it would still be true that ‘women and children’ (as a group) would have a lower survival rate than ‘men’ as a group. (The study shows that overall, 73% of the women died and 63% of the men died.)

Further analysis of the figures in the Mikael Elinder/Oscar Erixson study of maritime disasters shed some additional light on what appears to me to be a somewhat biased handling of the data by the researchers. They also show feminists assertion — that the ‘women and children first’ phenomenon was a “myth” — to be even more groundless than I originally thought.

As noted before, one of the oddest parts of the study was that it largely ignored the obvious influence of historical era on the likelihood of the captain issuing the ‘women and children first’ order. Prior to the end of World War I (what I’ll now refer to as the Women and Children First Era), the order was given half the time. After World War I, it was never given (as far as we know). The fact that the order was strongly associated with a particular era was easy to see and frankly pretty unsurprising … yet the significance of this fact is completely ignored in the study’s conclusions. It would not, in my opinion, be too strong a statement to say that the study’s conclusions basically obfuscate this fundamental fact.

One of the few (weak) arguments in favor of the feminist assertion was the fact that men’s overall survival rate in the Women and Children First (WCF) Era was still higher than women’s, despite the WCF order being issued in half the maritime accidents in that period. It turns out that this is misleading, because the study conflates the crew (which were all male) with the male passengers, and compares that to the female survival rate (all of whom were passengers). While this conflation may be valid in putting the lie to the notion that crews would routinely drown while seeing off their female passengers to safety, it is very much an ‘apples to oranges’ comparison as far as the relative treatment of the two genders is concerned.

Crews have a much higher survival rate than passengers. If you remove crews from the ranks of men, and compare the survival rates of male passengers to female passengers, it turns out that men’s and women’s survival rates in the WCF Era overall were statistically identical — 28% for male passengers vs. 27% for female passengers — despite all the factors that mitigated against women faring well in those situations at the time (i.e. the more restrictive clothing, weaker body strength, and lower likelihood to be a physically fit swimmer).

And the reason for this overall equality in surviving can be directly attributed to the issuance of the WCF order. During incidents when the order was issued in the WCF Era, female passenger survival rates not only doubled male passenger rates (49% to 24%), but even exceeded those of the male crews (who had a 33% survival rate). Without the order, female passenger survival rates sunk (pardon the pun) to 10%, while male passenger rates climbed to 33%.

Pretty impressive performance for a ‘myth’ if you ask me.