Eleanor Roosevelt once quipped that a woman is like a tea bag. You can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

So the former first lady would most certainly have approved of a new study which suggests women, far from being the weaker sex, are much more likely to survive a life-threatening crisis.

Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark trawled through historic data looking at death rates for men and women who suffered famines and epidemics, or who were sold into slavery.

In virtually every case, they found that women survived their ordeals far longer, often outliving their male counterparts by years, even when conditions were equally dire.

For example, before the Irish Potato Famine, which devastated the country from 1845 to 1849, both men and women lived until they were 38, on average. But at the height of the crisis, although life expectancy dropped to 18.17 for men, it only fell to 22.4 for women.

The same pattern was seen during the Swedish famine of 1772-1773 and the Ukraine harvest failures of 1933. Women also lived longer during two 19th century Icelandic measles outbreaks, with females lasting up to two years longer than men.