Titanic sinks with (more or less) 2,000 on board: Mostly women and children saved?

On April 15th, 1912 the passenger liner ship RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg during its inaugural voyage from Southampton dock to New York City. It is commonly believed that the 19th Century code of conduct that states "Women and children first" was enforced by the ship crew during the accident, but since there has been long time skepticism about this notion upon examination of historical shipwreck survival data, I wanted to examine with information visualization techniques whether the profile of the passengers of the Titanic, in terms of their sex, age (children or adults), survival status, and travel class, provide any support to the former hypothesis.

The dataset was obtained from the datasets package included in the R Statistical Computing language. The original data was extracted from a report of the British Board of Trade on the loss of the Titanic and recovered and compiled by Prof. Robert J. MacG. Dawson for use in statistics. A treemap was built with the area of the squares being proportional to the number of passengers in each category.

To interact with the figure below, please hover the mouse over the boxes to consult the number of passengers belonging to the categories described in the text.

• A roughly equal proportion of males (367) and females (344) survived the Titanic sinking.
• Among males more than a half of them (192) were crew members.
• Most adult women saved travelled in first class (140).
• Surviving children were mostly travelling in second and third class.
• Most dead adults were male crew members and male third class travellers.

From the observed data we can conclude that the common belief that women and children were not the largest group of survivors from the sinking, thus debunking a myth from the most famous shipwreck of the 20th Century.