I don't think gender should decide whether you get a seat or not. I'm pretty sure that mentality is dead already though (assuming it ever existed). These days it's survival of the fittest, the strong punch their way through the weak.
Meh, got interested and did some googling...
"A study of 18 catastrophes over the past 300 years was carried out by Swedish researchers Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixon and shows that captains and their crew are 18.7 per cent more likely to survive a shipwreck than their passengers.
This can be seen most recently with the Costa Concordia's Captain Francesco Schettino who fled before passengers were able to get off the boat when it foundered off the Tuscan coast on January 13 this year.
A rock tore a gash in its side, letting water flood into the engine rooms and causing the vessel to capsize. Twenty eight people lost their lives.
The researchers analysed some of the world's most famous disasters, ranging from the HMS Birkenhead that grounded in the Indian Ocean in 1852 to the MV Bulgaria tourist ship that sank on Russia's Volga River last year.
Out of 15,000 people who died in 18 sinkings, only 17.8 per cent of woman survived compared with 34.5 per cent of men.
In three of the shipwrecks, all of the women died, Elinder said.
The report also referred to the Titanic, which sank in the North Atlantic in the early morning of April 15, 1912.
The researchers, from Uppsala University, called the Titanic an exception to their findings, mainly because its captain, Edward Smith, threatened to shoot men if they tried to board the lifeboats before women and children.
Of the 1,496 people that perished with the Titanic, 73.3 percent of the women and 50.4 percent of the children survived compared to only 20.7 percent of the men.
Capt. Smith went down with his ship.
The report says: 'Evidence from the Titanic is not representative of maritime disasters in general.'
Captains gave orders to prioritise the rescue of women and children in only five of the 18 disasters.
Wide disparities between the sexes were found in the 1994 sinking of the MS Estonia in the Baltic Sea, which killed 852 people.
Only 5.4 percent of the women onboard survived, compared to 22 percent of the men.
The researchers noted that men, thanks to their physical strength, have better chances of surviving than women, barring self-sacrifice."
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2130003/Study-sea-disasters-men-better-survival-rate-ships-down.html#ixzz3sOPbyc3x
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Git outta mah way, woman!
