Contemporary disasters may not kill more women than men: an empirical inquiry into sex‐differentiated fatalities in the twenty‐first century

This study investigates the claim that women are disproportionately more likely to die in disasters by reviewing existing data sources and compiling new datasets on sex-differentiated disaster fatalities in the twenty-first century. The analysis is structured by disaster type, covering geophysical, meteorological, climatological, hydrological, and biological hazards, as well as broader national-level patterns based on global databases. It examines high-impact events across these disaster types and validates sex-disaggregated fatality patterns by integrating and assessing multiple data sources and demographic proxies. The findings do not support the widely cited claim of consistently higher female mortality. Instead, sex-disaggregated data remain very limited, and the evidence is largely inconclusive, except for biological disasters where male fatalities are consistently higher. Rather than assuming disproportionate effects in advance, sex-specific patterns should be assessed empirically. The study recommends mandatory, systematic reporting of gender-disaggregated fatalities and greater attention to differences in gender-based vulnerabilities across disaster types and contexts.