Research scuppers tradition of women and children first

A study of 18 tragedies at sea has revealed that when ships sink, crew members are more likely to survive than passengers, and men fare better than women.

On average, only half as many women as men survived the incidents, which spanned three centuries between 1852 and 2011. And children were the least likely to survive of all.

British gallantry at sea is also exposed as a myth, with fewer women surviving on British ships than those of other nationalities.

The Titanic disaster served as a “prime example of chivalry at sea,” said the Swedish researchers.

After the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic in April 1912, men stood back while women and children were given priority access to the limited number of lifeboats.

In the end, 70 per cent of the women and children were saved compared with only 20 per cent of the men. Famously, captain Edward Smith went down with his ship.

But a more typical example of a disaster at sea was the loss of the cruise liner Costa Concordia, the research suggests.

A total of 32 people died in January this year after the ship struck a reef off the Tuscan island of Giglio.

In the aftermath of the tragedy there were reports of crew members panicking and men pushing past children as they tried to save themselves.

The captain, Francesco Schettino, was later charged with manslaughter and abandoning his ship. In the media, he was branded “Captain Coward”.

The new study, published yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that when disaster strikes a ship, the captain plays a crucial leadership role.

Women had a survival advantage in just two of 18 disasters studied, the research showed. They were the sinking of the Titanic and the loss of the troop-carrying paddle steamer HMS Birkenhead, which struck a rock off the coast of South Africa in 1852.

In 11 of the shipwrecks, women were more likely to die than men, and in the remainder the survival rates of men and women were about equal.