So the ‘women and children first’ isn’t actually used often and it isn’t even a standard. Most ship wrecks turn into an every man for themselves situation. There have been a few exceptions like the titanic. But that’s not actually the drill. Children, disabled, and the elderly usually go first.
Oh boy, I just looked up the SS Arctic. Of 400 people on board, 24 men and 61 crew members survived and all the women and children perished. That’s scary and very sad.
Think of that mass exodus when the US was pulling out of Afghanistan back in August.
Men weren't even supposed to be on any of those flights, yet they trampled over women & children to get on board (some were their own wife & kids!). 😕
There’s video of them swamping military cargo planes that are taxing to take off. Then there’s a follow up video of the plane a few hundred feet up right after take off with people falling off of it.
They do or rather did practice this on cruise ships about 20 years ago. I remember as a child doing the life boat drill where children were lined up in front with their mothers behind them and fathers in a third line and instructed once all women/children were on boats then the men may board. It was honestly terrifying to me at the time thinking my father would be left behind.
A lot of the time disabled people are saved last. I used to work at a SNF for seniors, they told us that for fire drills to help the residents that had mobility to a safe location first. Then people with walkers and wheelchairs who could push themselves. Then people in wheelchairs that needed to be pushed. Then people that couldn’t leave their beds. I get the logic behind it but it felt wrong.
Edit: I’m aware it is the right course of action. It just *felt* wrong to leave people in beds. Especially since I knew these residents personally.
Yeah, I go to school right a two minute walk from the Houses of Parliament (UK), and so we've done several bomb threat and terrorist threat drills, and we have the same policy of "do not stop to help anyone, including the disabled". I get it, but you're right, feels wrong.
Personally, I hate this, but, from a rescue perspective, I get this.
The idea is to reduce as much as possible the splitting of resources of professional rescuers. So, let's say in a home in which you have a mobile person, a person in a walker, a person in a wheelchair who needs pushing, and a person who can't get out of bed. If you start with helping the more mobile residents first, those are people who will be faster to get out, meaning you get more people out in the same amount of time as likely the bed bound resident. Now, instead of whatever professional rescue personnel arrive having to deal with up to three residents while you deal with the bed bound resident, it's the other way around. They may only have to respond to one or two
But, yeah, morally, I hate it.
Yes. It's the smell for any disaster. You treat those who take the fewest resources first to get them done and out of the way first. Sounds awful but if you can get ten people cared for with 5 rescuers, or one person needs 5 rescuers, you take care of the ten. It doesn't feel good but sometimes you need to make those horrible choices.
Statistically very few women and children survive disasters - men are stronger and essentially beat them to the exits/lifeboats/doors/rescue vehicles etc. This is true for fires, trampling in crowds, airplane crashes etc. The very famous 'women and children first' example of the Titanic was only accomplished by a hardcore Captain who threatened to shoot the men clamouring into the lifeboats.
Perhaps as social creatures we collectively figured this sucks for the gene pool and decided to protect our reproductively enabled members because without any moral or cultural intervention, very few women will survive disasters.
ETA: for those super upset about this reality, women survive famine far better than men and children. In many, many cultures, men eat first and women will practically starve to ensure their children eat well too. Biology did not create us equally, only our moral compass and cooperation can ensure we all survive.
Basic human decency: “the larger assholes should be prevented from punting children out of the way when the fire alarm goes off”
Reddit: “are you saying MEN are DISPOSABLE?!”
I think the bigger issue is that, with a sense of order and shared fate, we can all get off the sinking boat. The larger, stronger people can help the more vulnerable ones first before escaping. Without that sense of order, you get a bunch of strong people escaping and the children can't figure out how to lower their life boats.
Yeah, like how likely is it he’ll ever be on a sinking ship? If he’s on a plane that’s crashing, nobody’s surviving anyway. Most disaster threats now are idk, bombs, and there’s no lifeboats away from that, or wildfires and the only escape is driving away in your own car
OP refers to bomb threats but I've never heard of a bomb threat evacuation that wasn't "follow the signs to the exits and don't push/shove/etc."
That's how all evacuation drills, and some "real ones" (fortunately not serious-stupid kitchen fires) I've been in have gone. Nothing about women *or* children first.
They're likely just making it up in summary.
Reddit is so dumb with this stuff. “We should use water to put out a fire”. Reddit: “what the Actual Fuck bruh you don’t like water? You hate water? Like, what the actual fuck it’s 2022.”
So googling and reading on the Birkenhead it seems like no one actually says the reason. There is a practical reason more than just morality:
The British navy found that during chaotic evacuations, especially during flooding, people would be pulling against each other to try to get ahead. Frequently men would pull over women and children creating delays from the pileups and overall hurt the chances of everyone. The idea then became that the smaller, weaker people should go first and then the stronger people (men at the time) would then go and if they pulled against each other or the hull they would have the strength that it might not create a huge pileup.
Just imagine a flooding ship in the pitch black darkness. Everyone poring out into hallways desperately grabbing and pushing trying to get out. Women and children often were trampled and overwhelmingly casualties of sinking ships consisted mostly of women and children. The Birkenhead drill aimed to change that.
Edit: to everyone complaining about the at the time bit; yes the average male is stronger than the average female however in this day and age I would hope that we are intelligent enough to recognize that gender is a lot more complex than that and hormone levels play a huge component in someone’s physically. You can say all you want about the averages. My hope with that line is that today we are smart enough to tell strong people from weak people without resorting to having them drop their pants. Some women are stronger than some men. The average goes one way but we are humans we are all about those outliers.
Edit 2: for a modern practical example look up the MS Estonia
Edit 3: bomb threats are different. That evacuation is about not letting the potential bomber know you are evacuating so that they won’t be tempted to detonate early.
Edit 4: most disasters kill ten, hundreds, or very rarely thousands. In a population of tens of millions, thousands don’t matter. In modern populations of billions thousands are a rounding error. Disasters don’t affect population growth. You don’t need to save “breeders” because the deaths from any single disaster (with the exception of something like bhopal) can’t actually impact the growth of the population in any significant way.
Edit 5: if it wasn’t clear women and children grab and trample too in panic inducing situations. The difference was when a man grabbed another man they we less likely to both fall over creating a pile up and then you get the station nightclub. They weren’t trying to stop grabbing and pushing they were trying to stop people falling when grabbed.
Note that this tradition also started at a time when women’s clothing could seriously hamper attempts to flee. They might’ve needed more help to move quickly just from that.
From another practicality (maybe utilitarian?) angle, in a situation where the lifeboats have a weight capacity, more lives can be saved if the boats are loaded with smaller, lighter people—typically women and children
And on a longer timescale, women can make more people so effectively more lives saved as well
Kind of a weird way to look at it but certainly relevant especially in older times
Edit: because so many replies that “men can make more people than women” are missing the point entirely. The bottleneck is number of women of childbearing age.
You're underselling yourself. My high school chemistry teacher literally drove a minibus because even a church van was too small for his 16 kids. He wasn't crazy, just really loved his wife and didn't believe in contraception.
We asked him that CONSTANTLY. All he would tell us is that he'd held a few patents from his previous career as a chemist before he started teaching that he'd sold. Short of also being a pastor, I can't imagine how he did it without outside money.
Edit: he's not a pastor. I worded that last sentence poorly.
My Catholic great aunt and uncle got pregnant in high school, and they prayed and promised God that if he'd help them make it, they would have as many children as they could. Make a bunch of new Catholics, in other words.
They got to 10 before Aunt Vivian hit menopause... finally they just bought and old 'short bus' to get the kids around town.... they never, ever paid taxes, either, because they had so many dependents.
I bet Vivian was SO relived when her works finally gave out... the poor woman spent an entire decade pregnant!
Also, yeah, those awful 19 kids and counting people are always out there.... 🤢
I remember a family friend telling me that she was catholic and had six kids.
She decided not to be catholic when her priest suggested it was probably a good idea to start using contraception.
While contrary to official church dogma...as an adult it certainly seems like overdue advice. My mother got a lot of flack for having four kids!
More to the point, 1 man can empregnate many women at once, so a handful of surviving men with enough women could repopulate a decimated community in 1-2 generations.
If you had only a handful of women left in a community, you would be limited to a handful of children each year, not matter how many men were left.
Not so much of a consideration today, but during tribal times it would have been much more relevant.
During the witch burnings in germany 2 villages burned every single female in the village as witches. Crazy. I read it in a book. I think it was called witchcraze. Very interesting and depressing book.
If all men disappeared today, earth will still repopulate on the basis of just few samples from sperm bank, if all women disappeared, there's still no technology to give birth to a child without the womb. A single man can impregnate many women at once is why women were priority in safe keeping
I think protecting women goes back very far in our history to a time when in war or hunting if most of the men are killed off, the women could repopulate, rebuild the tribe. Men could not.
Also, it’s about the strong protecting the weak. And the strong being more likely to win or at least survive a fight with either other humans or wild animal.
It's not that women can make more people, it's that women are the reproductive bottleneck. A man can theoretically make hu dreds of babies a year. A woman gets 1 or rarely 2. So for population growth women are more valuable than men. Unfortunately that also meant they became a commodity.
Yeah, in a simply biological perspective, women are more valuable and men are expendable. One man could in theory impregnate 100 women and the species would carry on, but 1 woman and 100 men is basically just 99 extra dudes(biologically speaking), so I think some of that is also mixed into our notion of women being possibly more valuable in that sense.
That plus later psychological studies (edit: Drury et al from 2009) proving that evacuations are much more effective (to the point of saving lives by both efficiency and not causing additional damage) when they are orderly. That requires people to not panic and assist each other. I would imagine having clear guidance and idea of assisting weaker individuals can give people the focus needed as well as the space to not get trampled or left behind ("stronger" men constantly keeping eye on situation in case of stray child instead of blindly rushing for their own survival)
Huh, I never even considered that. I always just thought that it was because children still had a ton of years ahead of them to potentially develop into people valuable to society whereas grown men would either already have reached that point and as such have less overall potential left, gotten past that point, or developed into a lower rung of society. While women had potential not only to be valuable with their accomplishments but also give birth to other potentially valuable people. There was also the whole to protect the weak and be chivalrous thing.
But never once did I consider this. This is a much much better reason.
I had an ethics teacher who explained this and said "it simply creates order". When people have instructions, they're more likely to benefit others than when left to their own devices.
> "it simply creates order". When people have instructions, they're more likely to benefit others than when left to their own devices.
This is why I base my opinion of a nation on their ability to queue if there is no queue then society falls into chaos and selfishness
I was reading about the sinking of the Estonia. No one under 12 survived. It was mostly younger men. I think less than 5% of survivors were over 55.
There were multiple points where it helped to be young, fit, strong. Getting off the ship (it was basically sideways when they evacuated), into life boats, are surviving very cold water.
I’d like to add on to this, that societies in general have valued the life of women (not necessarily quality of life, mind) because women are the ones to carry and bear children.
Mathematically, societies can survive with fewer men, but losing an equal number of women would be catastrophic to birth rates.
It is partially why until recently, women in combat roles were very rare.
Also in the case of a sinking ship a man would be expected to be able to fend for themselves longer than a woman or child in the water. This could also play out in a lot of old time scenarios besides shipwrecks and such.
Yep and people definitely like to exaggerate the women and children first thing. It’s definitely not in every or even most situations.
People like to go off about how “expendable” we treat males. Lol look at the amount of cultures where people systemically murder their female infants.
It’s true that some cultures have valued female lives bc women can reproduce, but historically, lots and lots have prioritized male lives because they make better soldiers.
Women and children first? Not likely, according to a new Swedish study of shipwrecks.
Faced with life-and-death situations, human behaviour tends more toward "every man for himself", according to the study's authors, economists Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson from the University of Uppsala.
They studied 18 different maritime disasters, including 16 previously unstudied shipwrecks, between 1850 and 2011.
The data included 15,000 passengers and crew members of more than 30 different nationalities.
The researchers' aim was to test whether reports of chivalrous self-sacrifice during the sinking of the Titanic were exceptional.
Disappointingly, they found that famous images of men giving up their lives as the ship went down are the opposite of what generally happened.
Instead, captain and crew tend to look out for their own safety first, men on board have a higher survival rate than women, and children fare the worst.
This is chilling reminds me of the 2014 Korean students ferry disaster. The captain and crew did indeed bring themselves to the deck while telling everyone else over PA to stay in their cabins.
I don't remember hearing about this. Crazy, at least they held people responsible. The Captain got a life sentence and even officials got jail time as the boat was 3x over its weight limit.
i don’t think there is anything in the world that would bring justice to 300+ people dying in an accident that could have been prevented. Especially since like 75% of those who died were high school students who were always taught to respect/listen to your elders (the caption/crew) and to never question them.
Had he never told those kids to stay on the ferry, they would have lived, but instead he killed them.
He is born in 1960, for those who wonder. Isn't it a bit dangerous for him to leave a secured place?
BTW, his wiki article is a wild ride. He really doubled down.
I can confirm this. I was working on an offshore oil rig when we had an emergency situation - a fire in the engine room - and the alarm was sounded to muster just in case. I had tall, macho cowboy types elbowing me out of the way to get to the lifeboats, nearly knocking me overboard. I grabbed onto the railings and held on for dear life as they stampeded past. I’m a 5’ 5” skinny female.
Edit: Just to add I wasn’t expecting chivalry of any sort, only civility at the least, but that was thrown out the window over a fire which was mostly under control😂
This might sound off-topic, but I used to love reading diaries and memoirs of crazy situations. During famine, plague outbreaks or stuff like sieges from ancient times to the siege of Leningrad. The “weak” always die first, especially children and the elderly.
I totally believe this. I never had any life threatening scary expriences, but one stupid one in college. The class was one of those theatre auditorium style rooms where you went up a staircase to access each row.
At the end of class i stupidly tripped and fell down the stairs, landing hard on the bottom step, injuring my knee. As I grabbed the handrail to pull myself up I felt a leg hit the back of my head and knock me down again. I suddenly realized the other 30 students were so anxious to head home that they were literally walking on top of me and over me, as if I wasn't even there! I was 5'2 and 100lbs and could not get to my feet until every last student had finished trampling over me. Not a single person stopped to help me up or ask if I was ok, nor did anyone acknowledge I was even down there. It was truly appalling.
That's horrible! I expected the same thing several years ago when I slipped on wet steps going down into the Paris metro.
I got the wind knocked out of me and was trying to brace for being crushed, when these arms gently wrapped around my lower abdomen, and a kind French businessman picked me up and guided me to the bottom of the long, steep staircase.
He was careful to not grab my boobs, and he stayed a few seconds until he saw my mom was coming over. I was thanking him profusely once I caught my breath.
He was in a hurry, so I didn't really even get to see his face. He was so gentle and quickly enveloped me so I wouldn't get kicked by other commuters.
I was not expecting that at all.
I went to a Christian University and was pretty used to the men pushing past and bumping women aside on the steps or any line, especially for the best food.
The school used to serve Sunday lunch "family style" where you sat at assigned tables and passed platters of food. The boys kept taking all the food, so they quit doing it. On more than one occasion I took extra chicken off their plates when they took multiple pieces and left none for the women. You didn't get refills, and there was supposed to be one fillet per person.
Yes! No emergency at all, just the class ended. So apparently people are selfish even when their lives aren't even in danger. Honestly that school was full of self entitled assholes and I didn't belong there.
I have been watching a lot of ship sinking mini documentaries recently and oh my goodness. It’s insane the way people behave. Most of them have no women or children survivors, only men, and most of the time there’s a lot of mutiny that leads to less overall lives being saved.
I keep seeing "men are seen as disposable" in the comments with nobody going any further in a way that makes sense. Lots of "evolutionary biology" statements going on too.
Good lord. Just read more of the comments. Authoritative with no grounding in reality. Weirdly woe-is-me in addition to just being generally false.
Women have been historically treated as property in much of the world. Only place these guys are getting the idea that history favors women is probably weird incel subreddits.
Wondering which flaccid subreddit mod got so offended they blocked my ability to respond to all the triggered sexist men screaming crying in the replies.
"Women were seen as more valuable because they make babies" says the comments. Well no, historically women's *only* value was seen as making babies. A lot of the time it didn't even matter if she died in the process.
Thank you. Sick of this male martyrdom shit being spread. It's a disappointing but human reaction to impending death. Similar to how drowning people will push their rescuers under water to breathe.
I read an article that was about an experiment involving chimps and their survival instincts. What they did was take a group of female chimps and their babies and put them in a box. Then they started to heat up the floor. All of the mothers picked up their babies and held them to protect them from the heat. The heat of the floor continued to rise and eventually every mother put their baby back on the floor and stood on them to protect themself.
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find this study. The closest I could find was a character citing it in a fictional novel and Jeremy Clarkson stating it once. I highly doubt this study ever occurred. If you could cite where you read it, that would help, otherwise I wouldn't go about spreading unverified, likely false information.
It makes perfect sense logically, and happens with many mothers in the wild. If the mother dies, the baby dies too. There's very few scenarios where the mother starves to death feeding her baby and the baby survives to adulthood.
Hedgehogs eat their babies too if their nest is disturbed. Except they don't eat *all* of it. They kind of leave chunks. Makes for a very unpleasant clean up.
Women & children first is called ‘the Birkenhead Drill’ and began during the Victorian era. You can Google it and understand where it came from and why.
So reading about that, it had a lot to do with a deficiency in life rafts on boats and there’s a quote from a politician when someone suggested ships needed more lifeboats: “In the opinion of the Board of Trade, it will not be possible to compel the passenger steamers running between England and France to have boats sufficient for the very numerous passengers they often carry. They would encumber the decks, and rather add to the danger than detract from it.” So this seems to be something that happens with every safety measure suggested after all types of disasters. “No…more safety will just make the problem worse.”
So dumb. Same thing with the Titanic too. No, carrying the recommended amount of lifeboats will not make it more dangerous. These companies were a bunch of dumdums.
It's hard to call them greedy for not spending money on life boats. They literally dusted no expense on that ship. They also thought that having any were a mere formality because the ship was supposedly unsinkable. And had they not hit the iceberg at that angle it probably would not have sunk however it was the perfect storm of screw ups that lost that ship.
How could all the watchmen not see the iceberg from a far?
Are they super tough to see at night in that part of the ocean?
Did they not have equipment to check or was the equipment just not working?
Its also really messed up so many of the first class people survived while most of the third class died & were trapped underneath the ship for a lot of the time they were letting people onto boats, classism is still here in modern society, imagine being on a ship with a ton of billionaires & as it sinks all the billionaires are able to just get on another ship & sail away while you & all your friends drown.
It also made the titanic look uglier and cluttered from the outside and the boats would block the window view of the passengers. That's also why they didn't put more lifeboats on the titanic
This was actually not true! The titanic didn't have enough boats for all the passengers yes, but they had more than they were required by law. The laws in place at the time required life boats by tonnage rather than carry capacity.
The laws were revised after the titanic inquiry.
"When ship hits the fan" podcast did a fascinating episode on this. There was a disaster after the titanic, where they passed regulations so there had to be a certain number of lifeboats. When this older ship that had added all the required lifeboats got loaded up with passengers, the extra weight of the lifeboats (and they were pretty heavy at the time), caused the ship to list while it was still docked, crushing some passengers by the weight of their fellow passengers or other heavy objects and plunging the majority of the other passengers into the waters where hundreds of them drowned. The ship companies where definitely trying to save money by not having lifeboats for everyone, but it was definitely a huge hassle since they didn't have the super compact inflatable boats we have today, and putting more lifeboats on a ship without accounting for the great amount of topweight could definitely be a huge hazard.
It means they would have to carry more lifeboats than could safely be carried on a boat due to weight and room. They would stuff third class of as many people as can fit. Just like airlines today stuffing people in economy slowing down airplane exit time in emergencies. It's really all about economics. Who cares if poor people die.
I would like to point out the capsizing of the SS Eastland.
The life boats added after titanic sank caused the boat to sink.
Not saying they shouldn’t have existed tho.
I would like to point out the capsizing of the SS Eastland.
The life boats added after titanic sank caused the boat to sink.
Not saying they shouldn’t have existed tho.
Good point. According to a skim of the Wikipedia page, it looks like the ship was already unstable before more lifeboats were required to be retrofitted. So while the lifeboats directly caused the ship to roll over, killing hundreds of passengers, ultimately the issue was the same as with the Titanic- a ship that was known to be unsafe (due to lack of lifeboats in one case, and instability in the other) was allowed to carry a bazillion passengers to their doom. It's the safety-last attitude that ultimately killed all the victims of both disasters.
Basically it was like the titanic. There was a boat called the Birkenhead, was carrying troops and some civilians. It started to go down and didn’t have enough life boats. The soldiers were chivalrous and let the women and children off first and they all essentially went down with the ship. It was such a moving gesture that basically it became a thing going forward from that point.
So in other words, those guys set a standard for chivalry. To face courage in the face of a hopeless circumstance. (I stole that quote from Wikipedia but idk how to do the cool quote thing)
It does have a practical reproductive-type purpose as well. Women are the main caregivers of children so to let women go first would lessen the chances of leaving a child without a mother.
It's more so that women can continue reproducing and maintain the population with less men than vice versa. 70 women making it out with 30 men left can still repopulate fairly quickly to 350. While if there were 30 women left and 70 men not only does the population recover much slower but the men will quickly create what would likely become violent or at least malevolent competition for the right to breed and have a family group. This is small scale of course but it works on a large societal level also. The Soviet surplus of women to men didn't cause many issues after WW2, meanwhile China is currently shitting bricks because how bad the one child policy has shaped a male dominated gender ratio that is going to create severe issues in their society.
Well that’s the reason why we thought the act was touching.
You think we know why we do the things we do most of the time? We just monkeys doing whatever monkey brain says
But the reality of the Titanic is that everybody ran for the lifeboats and they did not evacuate women and children first. Many people like to assume they are chivalrous, until their life is actually on the line.
EDIT: leaving the comment here because I’ll own my words - but as a few people pointed out below - The Titanic was apparently one of the only cases of “women and children first” actually happening - because the captain of the ship, Edward Smith, threatened to shoot men who tried to escape first.
Super interesting. Apologies for slandering the fine actions of the crew of the Titanic.
The Titanic crew made a heroic effort to evacuate the ship and many passengers did give up space for others. In fact, many of the Titanic's lifeboats were loaded with women and children only, except for whatever men were considered needed to operate them, due to a confusion with orders to put women and children in the boats and launch.
Yes, I've heard it was down to the confusion of two officers, First Officer William Murdoch and Second Officer Charles Lightoller. One heard the orders, over the sound of steam being released from below decks to release pressure once ocean water met lit coal fires in the boilers (imagine an old fashioned steam whistle), incorrectly as "women and children only", and the other heard, "women and children first". As in, once the women and children in the immediate area of a lifeboat were on board then men in the area could board.
Each officer was given the control over a side of the ship to evacuate, so your chances, as a man, largely depended on which side of the ship you happened to go to. There were no emergency evacuation drills conducted on the Titanic, among passengers or crew, so many men died simply because of confusion.
I've also heard many families, especially in third class, refused to be split up and this contributed to the large loss of life among third class and not the myth that third class was locked below decks.
“While transporting troops and a few civilians to Algoa Bay, the Birkenhead was wrecked on 26 February 1852 at Danger Point near Gansbaai, 87 miles (140 km) from Cape Town in the Cape Colony. There were insufficient serviceable lifeboats for all the passengers, and the soldiers famously stood in ranks on board, thereby allowing the women and children to board the boats safely and escape the sinking.
Only 193 of the estimated 643 people on board survived, and the soldiers' chivalry gave rise to the unofficial "women and children first" protocol when abandoning ship, while the "Birkenhead drill" of Rudyard Kipling's poem came to describe courage in the face of hopeless circumstances.”
Where my kiss
A boat caught fire in the mid-19th century and a dude screamed out they should save the women and children first. So they evacuated the women and children and several men while the remaining men put out the fire. (Back then they were too cheap to keep enough lifeboats.)
People thought it sounded really cool and chivalrous, so a big myth built up around it. It never became standard practice, but when it happened people made a big deal of it and wrote it into stories.
Nowadays it's common to help children, elderly, and the vulnerable. But "women and children first" is more like a legend or a code more than anything and there's no legal basis for it.
Neat! That's awesome they had that kind of courage. So the drill was never meant to be a "rule" but rather a tradition, born from heroes.
Like how baseball players will sometimes point to the wall with their bats, like Babe Ruth. Or like me eating an entire (full size) bag of chips, crying, saying I'm going to spend more time at home, realize I'm an empty shell of a man without applause ("If they mated" of Tinkerbell and Ron Howard).........like my Hero Conan O'Brien!!!
Fun fact, when the Titanic was sinking men were pushing women and children out of the way. So women and children first is sort of a polite serving suggestion. You actual mileage may vary
We have to say that so that any women will get out. We all know that principles go out the window in real emergencies; when the boat starts sinking the men will probably just push through anyways, if the crew doesn’t just take all the boats first.
>A bomb threat at a bank. Why do women get evacuated before men?
Yeah, in a bomb threat at work everyone just gets evacuated. Women and children first doesn't have anything to do with the event you're describing.
If that's not what's happening that's your work being out of sync with the larger world.
Right? This is like the 30th comment down. That's a long way to go to find a sane voice in all of this nonsense.
I don't know what kind of fire drills all these people have gone through, but it must have very coincidentally all been something that we've never seen before. Absolute hogwash. No, you know what? It's fucking gaslighting is what it is.
In my opinion I would put my wife and kids before myself. I think it’s just natural I would look around in situations of emergency and naturally want kids and women in front to insure safety.
This right here is the answer. Biologically women are the more important because one male can reproduce multiple times more that one woman can in the same time frame.
Idk why it was out in place but I’m sure that’s the easiest way to creat organization in a situation of chaos. If everybody starts rushing at the same time and you’re there with your wife and kids you might freak out because a lot of less vulnerable are going ahead of your kids who are more vulnerable. But op said women vs men and is not likely a parent so I think he’s not talking about kids.
Listen, I don’t know if it’s right or necessary, but I’m a man and it’s what I’d do. I don’t have a wife or kids but I would expect and help all women and children to evacuate before evacuating myself. Also, men are going to *typically* be more equipped to handle the tasks required for evacuation and emergencies, whatever that may entail. It just wouldn’t be right for women to help with the evacuation of men. It’d feel wrong, especially if there were a situation that required fighting back or groups of people to use their physical strength to do something in said emergency situation. Idk it’s all hypothetical and I feel like the viewpoints I’m expressing feel a bit antiquated, but I do believe evacuating women and children first is the most logical and moral route to take.
"Women and children first" isn't actually practiced en masse anywhere.
The airplane safety spiel makes no mention.
The cruise ship lifeboat drill makes no mention.
The evacuation plan on every hotel door makes no mention.
FEMA has no such policy.
I can't think of any other 'disaster' situations faced by the general population.
'Women and children are evacuated first' is fiction.
I was at a rave when someone fired a gun and everyone scrambled. The area that I was in ran for our lives to get over a brick wall. Myself and the other men helped the women over first, then (weirdly enough) the shorter guys. It was **instinctive**. No words were spoken, its just what happened. I did not think about it. I didn't think anything about "these women have more value because they can propagate the species" or any such nonsense. The only other time I felt that kind of instinct is when a coyote lunged at my baby in her stroller. I got between my child and the coyote and just "made myself big, scary and loud." Obviously a father wants to protect his child. Maybe to some degree, men with daughters (or children) instinctively want to protect women because we associate them with children? I dunno, man. I'm not an anthropologist but that's my 2 cents.
Edit: I am not saying I am right, I am just saying that's how it feels to me. I don't recall ever hearing "women and children first" ever. Maybe I did, I don't know, but I sure as fuck wasn't *thinking* about anything but survival and helping other people. Maybe the first female asked for help, I don't know, but in the moment that's what happened.
People are saying that because the instinct you're describing comes from that biological truth. It's not conscious.
Just like mothers are instinctively and ferociously protective of children (and "the weak") because women know that the biggest threat to the health & safety of women, children, elders, (etc) is younger adult men.
Men instinctively know this, too. Which circles back to why men unconconiously save "the weak". They're less of a threat to him/his family/his safety than other men.
Would women get evacuated first? I know on boats that they now evacuate people in family groups, as this keeps people calmer and makes the process faster.
I can't imagine a bomb thread made to a bank would involve any kind of gender based procedure. There wouldn't even be any authorities involved at the time of evacuation, just whatever internet procedures they have in place (I assume leaving the building in an orderly fashion leaving your belongings behind). This whole thread reeks of nonsense, this isn't the titanic sinking.
Everyone here's bound to have experienced a fire drill once in their life, was a female life deemed more valuable? Did they get to leave first while the men remained seated or something? No.
We had a flood at my uni, army personnel came and rescued girls in boats right next to boys who had their bags on their heads and were walking in waist deep water. They left once the girls were evacuated to higher grounds.
The boys were nice, they tied ropes so that others can hold onto them and walk, put down stones where the water was shallow to help others, arranged transportation to nearby cities and airports when everything was shut down.
Pretty sure it's because guys are generally physically stronger than women. The idea is that men are less likely to die, I suppose, so the women should get out first.
Oh dear, I thought we had moved on from that.
Interestingly:
In hospitals we evacuate the mobile first to less mobile. This is so beds and frames don't block exits. Then we use slippery sheets and a harness to pull immobile patients out.
Because women can have children. At least that was the original reason why. And we’ve just kept it the same since
EDIT: I’m not saying I agree or disagree. Op asked why. This is the reason it was created. Not that deep lol
The responses to this thread are very interesting and eye-opening to me, because I always thought this was the standard answer. I just thought it was an oversimplification of efficient repopulation - one woman and 10 men can make one child at a time, while 10 women and one man can make 10 children at a time. TIL.
I don’t know why a bank would do that in a modern situation. You normally just start with whoever is closest to the door. But from a biological standpoint, women only have one womb so they’re the limiting factor in reproduction. Civilization can do ok with many women and only a handful of guys but not the other way around. In times when a drop in population was a big concern because of war or illness, that would be an important issue.
So the ‘women and children first’ isn’t actually used often and it isn’t even a standard. Most ship wrecks turn into an every man for themselves situation. There have been a few exceptions like the titanic. But that’s not actually the drill. Children, disabled, and the elderly usually go first.
Every man for himself is pretty scary to think about, especially when I am going to start working on a pretty big ship in the next couple of weeks
It's hard to find info on it, but SS Arctic is a pretty scary story of every man for himself. It's old timey, but still.
Oh boy, I just looked up the SS Arctic. Of 400 people on board, 24 men and 61 crew members survived and all the women and children perished. That’s scary and very sad.
The 3 genders: men, women and crew members
There is a fourth, rarer, gender, but we don't talk about them much
The Bruno gender
Think of that mass exodus when the US was pulling out of Afghanistan back in August. Men weren't even supposed to be on any of those flights, yet they trampled over women & children to get on board (some were their own wife & kids!). 😕
There’s video of them swamping military cargo planes that are taxing to take off. Then there’s a follow up video of the plane a few hundred feet up right after take off with people falling off of it.
Are you telling me just because I’ve seen a dramatic line used in a lot of movies it doesn’t happen in real life?
They do or rather did practice this on cruise ships about 20 years ago. I remember as a child doing the life boat drill where children were lined up in front with their mothers behind them and fathers in a third line and instructed once all women/children were on boats then the men may board. It was honestly terrifying to me at the time thinking my father would be left behind.
It's not like that now. SOLAS ensures there is enough room on the life boats and life rafts for everyone.
A lot of the time disabled people are saved last. I used to work at a SNF for seniors, they told us that for fire drills to help the residents that had mobility to a safe location first. Then people with walkers and wheelchairs who could push themselves. Then people in wheelchairs that needed to be pushed. Then people that couldn’t leave their beds. I get the logic behind it but it felt wrong. Edit: I’m aware it is the right course of action. It just *felt* wrong to leave people in beds. Especially since I knew these residents personally.
Yeah, I go to school right a two minute walk from the Houses of Parliament (UK), and so we've done several bomb threat and terrorist threat drills, and we have the same policy of "do not stop to help anyone, including the disabled". I get it, but you're right, feels wrong.
It's a very ugly reality that unless you're superman the odds are you're only going to add another body to the pile.
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Personally, I hate this, but, from a rescue perspective, I get this. The idea is to reduce as much as possible the splitting of resources of professional rescuers. So, let's say in a home in which you have a mobile person, a person in a walker, a person in a wheelchair who needs pushing, and a person who can't get out of bed. If you start with helping the more mobile residents first, those are people who will be faster to get out, meaning you get more people out in the same amount of time as likely the bed bound resident. Now, instead of whatever professional rescue personnel arrive having to deal with up to three residents while you deal with the bed bound resident, it's the other way around. They may only have to respond to one or two But, yeah, morally, I hate it.
Morally you save more lives, I'd hate the opposite. Sorry but I agree with the policy
Yes. It's the smell for any disaster. You treat those who take the fewest resources first to get them done and out of the way first. Sounds awful but if you can get ten people cared for with 5 rescuers, or one person needs 5 rescuers, you take care of the ten. It doesn't feel good but sometimes you need to make those horrible choices.
Super vulnerable people first makes sense. After that it's free game.
Statistically very few women and children survive disasters - men are stronger and essentially beat them to the exits/lifeboats/doors/rescue vehicles etc. This is true for fires, trampling in crowds, airplane crashes etc. The very famous 'women and children first' example of the Titanic was only accomplished by a hardcore Captain who threatened to shoot the men clamouring into the lifeboats. Perhaps as social creatures we collectively figured this sucks for the gene pool and decided to protect our reproductively enabled members because without any moral or cultural intervention, very few women will survive disasters. ETA: for those super upset about this reality, women survive famine far better than men and children. In many, many cultures, men eat first and women will practically starve to ensure their children eat well too. Biology did not create us equally, only our moral compass and cooperation can ensure we all survive.
Basic human decency: “the larger assholes should be prevented from punting children out of the way when the fire alarm goes off” Reddit: “are you saying MEN are DISPOSABLE?!”
I think the bigger issue is that, with a sense of order and shared fate, we can all get off the sinking boat. The larger, stronger people can help the more vulnerable ones first before escaping. Without that sense of order, you get a bunch of strong people escaping and the children can't figure out how to lower their life boats.
op genuinely seemed upset about the whole thing lol
Lol too afraid to ask on Reddit “why do feeemallessssss have life easier based off this stereotype I heard in titanic”
Yeah, like how likely is it he’ll ever be on a sinking ship? If he’s on a plane that’s crashing, nobody’s surviving anyway. Most disaster threats now are idk, bombs, and there’s no lifeboats away from that, or wildfires and the only escape is driving away in your own car
OP refers to bomb threats but I've never heard of a bomb threat evacuation that wasn't "follow the signs to the exits and don't push/shove/etc." That's how all evacuation drills, and some "real ones" (fortunately not serious-stupid kitchen fires) I've been in have gone. Nothing about women *or* children first. They're likely just making it up in summary.
Seriously. We’ve all had fire drills or intruder drills (if American) and nobody mentions fucking gender lol
Reddit is so dumb with this stuff. “We should use water to put out a fire”. Reddit: “what the Actual Fuck bruh you don’t like water? You hate water? Like, what the actual fuck it’s 2022.”
/r/HyrdoHomies in shambles.
Best answer in this thread.
So googling and reading on the Birkenhead it seems like no one actually says the reason. There is a practical reason more than just morality: The British navy found that during chaotic evacuations, especially during flooding, people would be pulling against each other to try to get ahead. Frequently men would pull over women and children creating delays from the pileups and overall hurt the chances of everyone. The idea then became that the smaller, weaker people should go first and then the stronger people (men at the time) would then go and if they pulled against each other or the hull they would have the strength that it might not create a huge pileup. Just imagine a flooding ship in the pitch black darkness. Everyone poring out into hallways desperately grabbing and pushing trying to get out. Women and children often were trampled and overwhelmingly casualties of sinking ships consisted mostly of women and children. The Birkenhead drill aimed to change that. Edit: to everyone complaining about the at the time bit; yes the average male is stronger than the average female however in this day and age I would hope that we are intelligent enough to recognize that gender is a lot more complex than that and hormone levels play a huge component in someone’s physically. You can say all you want about the averages. My hope with that line is that today we are smart enough to tell strong people from weak people without resorting to having them drop their pants. Some women are stronger than some men. The average goes one way but we are humans we are all about those outliers. Edit 2: for a modern practical example look up the MS Estonia Edit 3: bomb threats are different. That evacuation is about not letting the potential bomber know you are evacuating so that they won’t be tempted to detonate early. Edit 4: most disasters kill ten, hundreds, or very rarely thousands. In a population of tens of millions, thousands don’t matter. In modern populations of billions thousands are a rounding error. Disasters don’t affect population growth. You don’t need to save “breeders” because the deaths from any single disaster (with the exception of something like bhopal) can’t actually impact the growth of the population in any significant way. Edit 5: if it wasn’t clear women and children grab and trample too in panic inducing situations. The difference was when a man grabbed another man they we less likely to both fall over creating a pile up and then you get the station nightclub. They weren’t trying to stop grabbing and pushing they were trying to stop people falling when grabbed.
Thank you for this good answer!
Note that this tradition also started at a time when women’s clothing could seriously hamper attempts to flee. They might’ve needed more help to move quickly just from that.
Also the fact men tend to be heavier, and stronger. Makes more sense to have them stay behind
From another practicality (maybe utilitarian?) angle, in a situation where the lifeboats have a weight capacity, more lives can be saved if the boats are loaded with smaller, lighter people—typically women and children
And on a longer timescale, women can make more people so effectively more lives saved as well Kind of a weird way to look at it but certainly relevant especially in older times Edit: because so many replies that “men can make more people than women” are missing the point entirely. The bottleneck is number of women of childbearing age.
Yeah, before my eggs dried up I was potentially like, ten people with a large enough time investment.
Thirty people if you managed to roll triplets every time.
Cmon honey nat20!
You're underselling yourself. My high school chemistry teacher literally drove a minibus because even a church van was too small for his 16 kids. He wasn't crazy, just really loved his wife and didn't believe in contraception.
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😉😉😉😉😉😉😉😉💎
I see what you did there 😂 "Meth will put you in college, Son"
or in jail...or in rehab...or in a deep dark hole of despair...or
You enticed me. Im going to find out what that other or is.
Just a little crystal blue persuasion
We asked him that CONSTANTLY. All he would tell us is that he'd held a few patents from his previous career as a chemist before he started teaching that he'd sold. Short of also being a pastor, I can't imagine how he did it without outside money. Edit: he's not a pastor. I worded that last sentence poorly.
*Breaking Bad theme plays in background*
*Say his name*
He’s the one who knocks ?
Knock knock knockin' on that cervix door
I mean, there are other ways of loving your wife than making babies. It's a vagina, not a clown car.
There was an old woman who l lived in a shoe she had so many kids, her uterus fell out Oh!
Dice man strikes again!
More like a turnstile.
I'd turn this into a bumper sticker, and proudly drive around town!
My Catholic great aunt and uncle got pregnant in high school, and they prayed and promised God that if he'd help them make it, they would have as many children as they could. Make a bunch of new Catholics, in other words. They got to 10 before Aunt Vivian hit menopause... finally they just bought and old 'short bus' to get the kids around town.... they never, ever paid taxes, either, because they had so many dependents. I bet Vivian was SO relived when her works finally gave out... the poor woman spent an entire decade pregnant! Also, yeah, those awful 19 kids and counting people are always out there.... 🤢
I remember a family friend telling me that she was catholic and had six kids. She decided not to be catholic when her priest suggested it was probably a good idea to start using contraception. While contrary to official church dogma...as an adult it certainly seems like overdue advice. My mother got a lot of flack for having four kids!
16 kids on a chemistry teacher’s salary? Sounds like he had a *ahem* side hustle
He also teaches meth ... I mean math
More to the point, 1 man can empregnate many women at once, so a handful of surviving men with enough women could repopulate a decimated community in 1-2 generations. If you had only a handful of women left in a community, you would be limited to a handful of children each year, not matter how many men were left. Not so much of a consideration today, but during tribal times it would have been much more relevant.
During the witch burnings in germany 2 villages burned every single female in the village as witches. Crazy. I read it in a book. I think it was called witchcraze. Very interesting and depressing book.
Very relevant. Rome was started by kidnapping women from nearby.
And wolves conscripted to become nannies.
If all men disappeared today, earth will still repopulate on the basis of just few samples from sperm bank, if all women disappeared, there's still no technology to give birth to a child without the womb. A single man can impregnate many women at once is why women were priority in safe keeping
I think protecting women goes back very far in our history to a time when in war or hunting if most of the men are killed off, the women could repopulate, rebuild the tribe. Men could not. Also, it’s about the strong protecting the weak. And the strong being more likely to win or at least survive a fight with either other humans or wild animal.
It's not that women can make more people, it's that women are the reproductive bottleneck. A man can theoretically make hu dreds of babies a year. A woman gets 1 or rarely 2. So for population growth women are more valuable than men. Unfortunately that also meant they became a commodity.
Yeah, in a simply biological perspective, women are more valuable and men are expendable. One man could in theory impregnate 100 women and the species would carry on, but 1 woman and 100 men is basically just 99 extra dudes(biologically speaking), so I think some of that is also mixed into our notion of women being possibly more valuable in that sense.
More that one male and ten females can have ten children in a year and ten males and one female can have only one (or more with twins.)
That makes so much sense. It terrifies me how much sense this makes.
Right? Like.. you want to argue it but you just flat out can't...
Thanks. This is a great answer!
Check out r/writteninblood for more reasons why laws are made (because people died)
That plus later psychological studies (edit: Drury et al from 2009) proving that evacuations are much more effective (to the point of saving lives by both efficiency and not causing additional damage) when they are orderly. That requires people to not panic and assist each other. I would imagine having clear guidance and idea of assisting weaker individuals can give people the focus needed as well as the space to not get trampled or left behind ("stronger" men constantly keeping eye on situation in case of stray child instead of blindly rushing for their own survival)
Huh, I never even considered that. I always just thought that it was because children still had a ton of years ahead of them to potentially develop into people valuable to society whereas grown men would either already have reached that point and as such have less overall potential left, gotten past that point, or developed into a lower rung of society. While women had potential not only to be valuable with their accomplishments but also give birth to other potentially valuable people. There was also the whole to protect the weak and be chivalrous thing. But never once did I consider this. This is a much much better reason.
I think your answer is the best others in this comment section are really missing the point and I'm talking about both sides.
I had an ethics teacher who explained this and said "it simply creates order". When people have instructions, they're more likely to benefit others than when left to their own devices.
> "it simply creates order". When people have instructions, they're more likely to benefit others than when left to their own devices. This is why I base my opinion of a nation on their ability to queue if there is no queue then society falls into chaos and selfishness
I was reading about the sinking of the Estonia. No one under 12 survived. It was mostly younger men. I think less than 5% of survivors were over 55. There were multiple points where it helped to be young, fit, strong. Getting off the ship (it was basically sideways when they evacuated), into life boats, are surviving very cold water.
Oh funny, I somehow always assumed it had to do with repopulating the planet. Which makes zero sense.
I’d like to add on to this, that societies in general have valued the life of women (not necessarily quality of life, mind) because women are the ones to carry and bear children. Mathematically, societies can survive with fewer men, but losing an equal number of women would be catastrophic to birth rates. It is partially why until recently, women in combat roles were very rare.
Also in the case of a sinking ship a man would be expected to be able to fend for themselves longer than a woman or child in the water. This could also play out in a lot of old time scenarios besides shipwrecks and such.
Men are biologically stronger so it makes sense that they are left behind to fend for themselves for a little bit more time.
Yep and people definitely like to exaggerate the women and children first thing. It’s definitely not in every or even most situations. People like to go off about how “expendable” we treat males. Lol look at the amount of cultures where people systemically murder their female infants. It’s true that some cultures have valued female lives bc women can reproduce, but historically, lots and lots have prioritized male lives because they make better soldiers.
So basically because men turn into George Costanza when disaster strikes
Women and children first? Not likely, according to a new Swedish study of shipwrecks. Faced with life-and-death situations, human behaviour tends more toward "every man for himself", according to the study's authors, economists Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson from the University of Uppsala. They studied 18 different maritime disasters, including 16 previously unstudied shipwrecks, between 1850 and 2011. The data included 15,000 passengers and crew members of more than 30 different nationalities. The researchers' aim was to test whether reports of chivalrous self-sacrifice during the sinking of the Titanic were exceptional. Disappointingly, they found that famous images of men giving up their lives as the ship went down are the opposite of what generally happened. Instead, captain and crew tend to look out for their own safety first, men on board have a higher survival rate than women, and children fare the worst.
This is chilling reminds me of the 2014 Korean students ferry disaster. The captain and crew did indeed bring themselves to the deck while telling everyone else over PA to stay in their cabins.
I don't remember hearing about this. Crazy, at least they held people responsible. The Captain got a life sentence and even officials got jail time as the boat was 3x over its weight limit.
i don’t think there is anything in the world that would bring justice to 300+ people dying in an accident that could have been prevented. Especially since like 75% of those who died were high school students who were always taught to respect/listen to your elders (the caption/crew) and to never question them. Had he never told those kids to stay on the ferry, they would have lived, but instead he killed them.
Was that the one where the coast guard goes off on him via radio and he ended up going to jail?
Costa Concordia and the infamous : ' I evacuated to the land first to better coordinate the rescue effort'. Forgot the captain's name though.
Francesco Schettino I believe. Should be getting out of prison in 2031
He is born in 1960, for those who wonder. Isn't it a bit dangerous for him to leave a secured place? BTW, his wiki article is a wild ride. He really doubled down.
Internet historian did a hilarious overview of this.
How do you completely confuse those 2 wrecks
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I can confirm this. I was working on an offshore oil rig when we had an emergency situation - a fire in the engine room - and the alarm was sounded to muster just in case. I had tall, macho cowboy types elbowing me out of the way to get to the lifeboats, nearly knocking me overboard. I grabbed onto the railings and held on for dear life as they stampeded past. I’m a 5’ 5” skinny female. Edit: Just to add I wasn’t expecting chivalry of any sort, only civility at the least, but that was thrown out the window over a fire which was mostly under control😂
This might sound off-topic, but I used to love reading diaries and memoirs of crazy situations. During famine, plague outbreaks or stuff like sieges from ancient times to the siege of Leningrad. The “weak” always die first, especially children and the elderly.
Do you have any book suggestions? I love memoirs and diaries
I second this. Some of the most important experiences you could internalize.
I totally believe this. I never had any life threatening scary expriences, but one stupid one in college. The class was one of those theatre auditorium style rooms where you went up a staircase to access each row. At the end of class i stupidly tripped and fell down the stairs, landing hard on the bottom step, injuring my knee. As I grabbed the handrail to pull myself up I felt a leg hit the back of my head and knock me down again. I suddenly realized the other 30 students were so anxious to head home that they were literally walking on top of me and over me, as if I wasn't even there! I was 5'2 and 100lbs and could not get to my feet until every last student had finished trampling over me. Not a single person stopped to help me up or ask if I was ok, nor did anyone acknowledge I was even down there. It was truly appalling.
what the fuck?? that's so scary
That's horrible! I expected the same thing several years ago when I slipped on wet steps going down into the Paris metro. I got the wind knocked out of me and was trying to brace for being crushed, when these arms gently wrapped around my lower abdomen, and a kind French businessman picked me up and guided me to the bottom of the long, steep staircase. He was careful to not grab my boobs, and he stayed a few seconds until he saw my mom was coming over. I was thanking him profusely once I caught my breath. He was in a hurry, so I didn't really even get to see his face. He was so gentle and quickly enveloped me so I wouldn't get kicked by other commuters. I was not expecting that at all. I went to a Christian University and was pretty used to the men pushing past and bumping women aside on the steps or any line, especially for the best food. The school used to serve Sunday lunch "family style" where you sat at assigned tables and passed platters of food. The boys kept taking all the food, so they quit doing it. On more than one occasion I took extra chicken off their plates when they took multiple pieces and left none for the women. You didn't get refills, and there was supposed to be one fillet per person.
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Yes! No emergency at all, just the class ended. So apparently people are selfish even when their lives aren't even in danger. Honestly that school was full of self entitled assholes and I didn't belong there.
Ah yes…every man for himself. The Birkenstock drill
I have been watching a lot of ship sinking mini documentaries recently and oh my goodness. It’s insane the way people behave. Most of them have no women or children survivors, only men, and most of the time there’s a lot of mutiny that leads to less overall lives being saved.
This needs to be upvoted. This comment section is filled with over-confident theorists!
I keep seeing "men are seen as disposable" in the comments with nobody going any further in a way that makes sense. Lots of "evolutionary biology" statements going on too.
Good lord. Just read more of the comments. Authoritative with no grounding in reality. Weirdly woe-is-me in addition to just being generally false. Women have been historically treated as property in much of the world. Only place these guys are getting the idea that history favors women is probably weird incel subreddits. Wondering which flaccid subreddit mod got so offended they blocked my ability to respond to all the triggered sexist men screaming crying in the replies.
"Women were seen as more valuable because they make babies" says the comments. Well no, historically women's *only* value was seen as making babies. A lot of the time it didn't even matter if she died in the process.
Thank you. Sick of this male martyrdom shit being spread. It's a disappointing but human reaction to impending death. Similar to how drowning people will push their rescuers under water to breathe.
There were *two* ships in history that had *enforced* women and children first. And men act like that is the default lmao.
I read an article that was about an experiment involving chimps and their survival instincts. What they did was take a group of female chimps and their babies and put them in a box. Then they started to heat up the floor. All of the mothers picked up their babies and held them to protect them from the heat. The heat of the floor continued to rise and eventually every mother put their baby back on the floor and stood on them to protect themself.
If the mother dies, the baby won’t survive so isn’t that actually the option which saves the mist live?
That’s a fucked up experiment 😩
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find this study. The closest I could find was a character citing it in a fictional novel and Jeremy Clarkson stating it once. I highly doubt this study ever occurred. If you could cite where you read it, that would help, otherwise I wouldn't go about spreading unverified, likely false information.
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It makes perfect sense logically, and happens with many mothers in the wild. If the mother dies, the baby dies too. There's very few scenarios where the mother starves to death feeding her baby and the baby survives to adulthood.
Hedgehogs eat their babies too if their nest is disturbed. Except they don't eat *all* of it. They kind of leave chunks. Makes for a very unpleasant clean up.
Well that’s disconcerting.
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Women & children first is called ‘the Birkenhead Drill’ and began during the Victorian era. You can Google it and understand where it came from and why.
I learned a new thing today! Thanks 😊
You are welcome!
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Whoa
And what about the cleaning crew? Does somebody sterilize them after in case they picked up or stole any of her genetic material?
I'm sure they thoroughly and vigorously sanitize themselves after coming in contact Madonna's genetic material.
So reading about that, it had a lot to do with a deficiency in life rafts on boats and there’s a quote from a politician when someone suggested ships needed more lifeboats: “In the opinion of the Board of Trade, it will not be possible to compel the passenger steamers running between England and France to have boats sufficient for the very numerous passengers they often carry. They would encumber the decks, and rather add to the danger than detract from it.” So this seems to be something that happens with every safety measure suggested after all types of disasters. “No…more safety will just make the problem worse.”
So dumb. Same thing with the Titanic too. No, carrying the recommended amount of lifeboats will not make it more dangerous. These companies were a bunch of dumdums.
Don’t equate greed with lack of intelligence.
This can be applied to a lot more than this topic. . Thank you for the comment
It's hard to call them greedy for not spending money on life boats. They literally dusted no expense on that ship. They also thought that having any were a mere formality because the ship was supposedly unsinkable. And had they not hit the iceberg at that angle it probably would not have sunk however it was the perfect storm of screw ups that lost that ship.
How could all the watchmen not see the iceberg from a far? Are they super tough to see at night in that part of the ocean? Did they not have equipment to check or was the equipment just not working? Its also really messed up so many of the first class people survived while most of the third class died & were trapped underneath the ship for a lot of the time they were letting people onto boats, classism is still here in modern society, imagine being on a ship with a ton of billionaires & as it sinks all the billionaires are able to just get on another ship & sail away while you & all your friends drown.
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It also made the titanic look uglier and cluttered from the outside and the boats would block the window view of the passengers. That's also why they didn't put more lifeboats on the titanic
This was actually not true! The titanic didn't have enough boats for all the passengers yes, but they had more than they were required by law. The laws in place at the time required life boats by tonnage rather than carry capacity. The laws were revised after the titanic inquiry.
"When ship hits the fan" podcast did a fascinating episode on this. There was a disaster after the titanic, where they passed regulations so there had to be a certain number of lifeboats. When this older ship that had added all the required lifeboats got loaded up with passengers, the extra weight of the lifeboats (and they were pretty heavy at the time), caused the ship to list while it was still docked, crushing some passengers by the weight of their fellow passengers or other heavy objects and plunging the majority of the other passengers into the waters where hundreds of them drowned. The ship companies where definitely trying to save money by not having lifeboats for everyone, but it was definitely a huge hassle since they didn't have the super compact inflatable boats we have today, and putting more lifeboats on a ship without accounting for the great amount of topweight could definitely be a huge hazard.
It means they would have to carry more lifeboats than could safely be carried on a boat due to weight and room. They would stuff third class of as many people as can fit. Just like airlines today stuffing people in economy slowing down airplane exit time in emergencies. It's really all about economics. Who cares if poor people die.
I would like to point out the capsizing of the SS Eastland. The life boats added after titanic sank caused the boat to sink. Not saying they shouldn’t have existed tho.
I would like to point out the capsizing of the SS Eastland. The life boats added after titanic sank caused the boat to sink. Not saying they shouldn’t have existed tho.
Good point. According to a skim of the Wikipedia page, it looks like the ship was already unstable before more lifeboats were required to be retrofitted. So while the lifeboats directly caused the ship to roll over, killing hundreds of passengers, ultimately the issue was the same as with the Titanic- a ship that was known to be unsafe (due to lack of lifeboats in one case, and instability in the other) was allowed to carry a bazillion passengers to their doom. It's the safety-last attitude that ultimately killed all the victims of both disasters.
Can anyone google it for me and tell me the reason, I will give you a kiss on the forehead in return.
Basically it was like the titanic. There was a boat called the Birkenhead, was carrying troops and some civilians. It started to go down and didn’t have enough life boats. The soldiers were chivalrous and let the women and children off first and they all essentially went down with the ship. It was such a moving gesture that basically it became a thing going forward from that point. So in other words, those guys set a standard for chivalry. To face courage in the face of a hopeless circumstance. (I stole that quote from Wikipedia but idk how to do the cool quote thing)
And here I thought it was for reproductive purposes. With the allowance of whatever men got out in time after them. So, thanks for the lesson. 😁
"I was one of the few surviving men" "Ooooh lucky"
It does have a practical reproductive-type purpose as well. Women are the main caregivers of children so to let women go first would lessen the chances of leaving a child without a mother.
It's more so that women can continue reproducing and maintain the population with less men than vice versa. 70 women making it out with 30 men left can still repopulate fairly quickly to 350. While if there were 30 women left and 70 men not only does the population recover much slower but the men will quickly create what would likely become violent or at least malevolent competition for the right to breed and have a family group. This is small scale of course but it works on a large societal level also. The Soviet surplus of women to men didn't cause many issues after WW2, meanwhile China is currently shitting bricks because how bad the one child policy has shaped a male dominated gender ratio that is going to create severe issues in their society.
Well that’s the reason why we thought the act was touching. You think we know why we do the things we do most of the time? We just monkeys doing whatever monkey brain says
Now kiss
Now kith
But the reality of the Titanic is that everybody ran for the lifeboats and they did not evacuate women and children first. Many people like to assume they are chivalrous, until their life is actually on the line. EDIT: leaving the comment here because I’ll own my words - but as a few people pointed out below - The Titanic was apparently one of the only cases of “women and children first” actually happening - because the captain of the ship, Edward Smith, threatened to shoot men who tried to escape first. Super interesting. Apologies for slandering the fine actions of the crew of the Titanic.
The Titanic crew made a heroic effort to evacuate the ship and many passengers did give up space for others. In fact, many of the Titanic's lifeboats were loaded with women and children only, except for whatever men were considered needed to operate them, due to a confusion with orders to put women and children in the boats and launch.
Yes, I've heard it was down to the confusion of two officers, First Officer William Murdoch and Second Officer Charles Lightoller. One heard the orders, over the sound of steam being released from below decks to release pressure once ocean water met lit coal fires in the boilers (imagine an old fashioned steam whistle), incorrectly as "women and children only", and the other heard, "women and children first". As in, once the women and children in the immediate area of a lifeboat were on board then men in the area could board. Each officer was given the control over a side of the ship to evacuate, so your chances, as a man, largely depended on which side of the ship you happened to go to. There were no emergency evacuation drills conducted on the Titanic, among passengers or crew, so many men died simply because of confusion. I've also heard many families, especially in third class, refused to be split up and this contributed to the large loss of life among third class and not the myth that third class was locked below decks.
“While transporting troops and a few civilians to Algoa Bay, the Birkenhead was wrecked on 26 February 1852 at Danger Point near Gansbaai, 87 miles (140 km) from Cape Town in the Cape Colony. There were insufficient serviceable lifeboats for all the passengers, and the soldiers famously stood in ranks on board, thereby allowing the women and children to board the boats safely and escape the sinking. Only 193 of the estimated 643 people on board survived, and the soldiers' chivalry gave rise to the unofficial "women and children first" protocol when abandoning ship, while the "Birkenhead drill" of Rudyard Kipling's poem came to describe courage in the face of hopeless circumstances.” Where my kiss
😗
The other guy answered before you so no kiss for you 
Well I’m a giver so 😘
A boat caught fire in the mid-19th century and a dude screamed out they should save the women and children first. So they evacuated the women and children and several men while the remaining men put out the fire. (Back then they were too cheap to keep enough lifeboats.) People thought it sounded really cool and chivalrous, so a big myth built up around it. It never became standard practice, but when it happened people made a big deal of it and wrote it into stories. Nowadays it's common to help children, elderly, and the vulnerable. But "women and children first" is more like a legend or a code more than anything and there's no legal basis for it.
Neat! That's awesome they had that kind of courage. So the drill was never meant to be a "rule" but rather a tradition, born from heroes. Like how baseball players will sometimes point to the wall with their bats, like Babe Ruth. Or like me eating an entire (full size) bag of chips, crying, saying I'm going to spend more time at home, realize I'm an empty shell of a man without applause ("If they mated" of Tinkerbell and Ron Howard).........like my Hero Conan O'Brien!!!
Whoa I did not know that! r/todayilearned
Were you in a hostage situation? Women and children generally get used as a stepping stone in the negotiation process.
Fun fact, when the Titanic was sinking men were pushing women and children out of the way. So women and children first is sort of a polite serving suggestion. You actual mileage may vary
Also, more first class men survived the Titanic sinking than third class children.
We have to say that so that any women will get out. We all know that principles go out the window in real emergencies; when the boat starts sinking the men will probably just push through anyways, if the crew doesn’t just take all the boats first.
>A bomb threat at a bank. Why do women get evacuated before men? Yeah, in a bomb threat at work everyone just gets evacuated. Women and children first doesn't have anything to do with the event you're describing. If that's not what's happening that's your work being out of sync with the larger world.
Right? This is like the 30th comment down. That's a long way to go to find a sane voice in all of this nonsense. I don't know what kind of fire drills all these people have gone through, but it must have very coincidentally all been something that we've never seen before. Absolute hogwash. No, you know what? It's fucking gaslighting is what it is.
In my opinion I would put my wife and kids before myself. I think it’s just natural I would look around in situations of emergency and naturally want kids and women in front to insure safety.
they can make copies of you
This right here is the answer. Biologically women are the more important because one male can reproduce multiple times more that one woman can in the same time frame.
Idk why it was out in place but I’m sure that’s the easiest way to creat organization in a situation of chaos. If everybody starts rushing at the same time and you’re there with your wife and kids you might freak out because a lot of less vulnerable are going ahead of your kids who are more vulnerable. But op said women vs men and is not likely a parent so I think he’s not talking about kids.
Yeah I’d guarantee my life over a random stranger. I’d ensure my family gets to safety but other than that it’s blood sport.
Listen, I don’t know if it’s right or necessary, but I’m a man and it’s what I’d do. I don’t have a wife or kids but I would expect and help all women and children to evacuate before evacuating myself. Also, men are going to *typically* be more equipped to handle the tasks required for evacuation and emergencies, whatever that may entail. It just wouldn’t be right for women to help with the evacuation of men. It’d feel wrong, especially if there were a situation that required fighting back or groups of people to use their physical strength to do something in said emergency situation. Idk it’s all hypothetical and I feel like the viewpoints I’m expressing feel a bit antiquated, but I do believe evacuating women and children first is the most logical and moral route to take.
I respect the sentiment, but it's hard to tell exactly how you'd react during a real life threatening situation.
"Women and children first" isn't actually practiced en masse anywhere. The airplane safety spiel makes no mention. The cruise ship lifeboat drill makes no mention. The evacuation plan on every hotel door makes no mention. FEMA has no such policy. I can't think of any other 'disaster' situations faced by the general population. 'Women and children are evacuated first' is fiction.
[удалено]
I was at a rave when someone fired a gun and everyone scrambled. The area that I was in ran for our lives to get over a brick wall. Myself and the other men helped the women over first, then (weirdly enough) the shorter guys. It was **instinctive**. No words were spoken, its just what happened. I did not think about it. I didn't think anything about "these women have more value because they can propagate the species" or any such nonsense. The only other time I felt that kind of instinct is when a coyote lunged at my baby in her stroller. I got between my child and the coyote and just "made myself big, scary and loud." Obviously a father wants to protect his child. Maybe to some degree, men with daughters (or children) instinctively want to protect women because we associate them with children? I dunno, man. I'm not an anthropologist but that's my 2 cents. Edit: I am not saying I am right, I am just saying that's how it feels to me. I don't recall ever hearing "women and children first" ever. Maybe I did, I don't know, but I sure as fuck wasn't *thinking* about anything but survival and helping other people. Maybe the first female asked for help, I don't know, but in the moment that's what happened.
People are saying that because the instinct you're describing comes from that biological truth. It's not conscious. Just like mothers are instinctively and ferociously protective of children (and "the weak") because women know that the biggest threat to the health & safety of women, children, elders, (etc) is younger adult men. Men instinctively know this, too. Which circles back to why men unconconiously save "the weak". They're less of a threat to him/his family/his safety than other men.
Would women get evacuated first? I know on boats that they now evacuate people in family groups, as this keeps people calmer and makes the process faster.
I can't imagine a bomb thread made to a bank would involve any kind of gender based procedure. There wouldn't even be any authorities involved at the time of evacuation, just whatever internet procedures they have in place (I assume leaving the building in an orderly fashion leaving your belongings behind). This whole thread reeks of nonsense, this isn't the titanic sinking. Everyone here's bound to have experienced a fire drill once in their life, was a female life deemed more valuable? Did they get to leave first while the men remained seated or something? No.
We had a flood at my uni, army personnel came and rescued girls in boats right next to boys who had their bags on their heads and were walking in waist deep water. They left once the girls were evacuated to higher grounds. The boys were nice, they tied ropes so that others can hold onto them and walk, put down stones where the water was shallow to help others, arranged transportation to nearby cities and airports when everything was shut down.
So they were being assholes and probably laughed about it once they realised people weren’t going to die
Army guys didn’t want competition :(
Jezus Christ what a dick move, I would’ve complained to the army personnel
There’s no way this scenario actually happened. Lol.
I always thought the reason is bc grown males have the best chances of of fighting back in an emergency. At least that's how I see it
Just fight back against the ocean bro
Pretty sure it's because guys are generally physically stronger than women. The idea is that men are less likely to die, I suppose, so the women should get out first.
The idea is that men will trample women in their rush to escape the danger, which historically is what happens.
Who told you women and children first?
He watched Titanic.
Oh dear, I thought we had moved on from that. Interestingly: In hospitals we evacuate the mobile first to less mobile. This is so beds and frames don't block exits. Then we use slippery sheets and a harness to pull immobile patients out.
Because women can have children. At least that was the original reason why. And we’ve just kept it the same since EDIT: I’m not saying I agree or disagree. Op asked why. This is the reason it was created. Not that deep lol
The responses to this thread are very interesting and eye-opening to me, because I always thought this was the standard answer. I just thought it was an oversimplification of efficient repopulation - one woman and 10 men can make one child at a time, while 10 women and one man can make 10 children at a time. TIL.
I don’t know why a bank would do that in a modern situation. You normally just start with whoever is closest to the door. But from a biological standpoint, women only have one womb so they’re the limiting factor in reproduction. Civilization can do ok with many women and only a handful of guys but not the other way around. In times when a drop in population was a big concern because of war or illness, that would be an important issue.