However, that doesn't preclude the conceptualization of "women and children first" from being sexist against women

This is a classic move, first dissected in Jean Curthoys's "Feminist Amnesia".

When you are losing the debate about real human beings, when people start to point out pesky facts like the death gap, the homelessness gap, the conscription exemption, the violence gap, the infanticide gap, then change the subject to the concepts of man / women. Abuse Pythagoras for making up a list in which "male" is preferred to "female". And ignore all the ways that female is preferred to male (nurturing, cooperative, caring, nice, sharing, etc etc).

The trouble with this move is that whatever we may conclude about the relative merit of concepts, the dead men are still dead.

It would be more honest to do a scorecard and see if, on average, men have it better than women. Not the top 0.01%of men, but men in general. According to the OECD's analysis, in most countries they do not. http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/11111111111

Even better, one could analyze how well off people are, and try and work out the factors that contribute to that. It may well be that the usual suspects are not the most important. As long as we stick to crude and prescientific techniques like picking out some semi-random characteristics as important, we are not going to get very far. A case in point: should Barack Obama's (obviously black, female) daughters qualify for affirmative action and preference getting into college, over a white male who was brought up in poverty?