One will cite a lower metabolic rate in women making for a higher chance of survival. But D G Duff, says:
“...I believe women have, from birth to old age, a more tenacious hold on life and, others things being equal, they can better resist cold exhaustion; and a recent cross-Channel race affords me some support. They have been conditioned through the ages to shock-survival in their role of preserving and continuing the race. Men are fashioned rather for urgent action and fight.“

I think that in the last extremity a woman goes on because she is a female animal. Whether she is a mother already is not important, for in the last resort she doesn't think (not even of her children, living or unborn). She is motivated by the same instinct that sends women back into fires to die rescuing their children and by that which makes a more reckless fighter of any female than the male. These women alone in the mountains, at the same time that they come closer to the animal than they have been since birth, transcend all human standards of courage, and all the feminist ideals of superiority.

It is to be hoped that those who died knew some reward, some glimpse of the intimations of immortality that demanded this last struggle - but one knows that the absence of reward would not have mattered to them in the end. Continue to Postscript