According to a new Australian study, males, especially young ones are the weaker sex.
The researchers arrived at this conclusion after looking at under-18 accident and emergency visits across Australia and New Zealand over a 12 month period.
The research revealed that boys are more prone to becoming seriously ill or injured, and according to the study of the 350,000 children taken to the hospital in the study period, 45% were girls - the rest were boys.
Researcher Dr Jason Acworth says the disparity could not be explained away as "boys being boys'' because even when it was just related to boys being more likely to injure themselves, they still made up a greater proportion.
Dr Acworth says boys are over-represented when it comes to injuries and even when that was factored for, they still made up a greater proportion - 55% as against 45% and the view was that males are the weaker sex.
Dr Acworth, the study's lead author, from the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Royal Children's Hospital in Brisbane, included all child emergency room visits during 2004 across 11 paediatric and general hospitals who are part of a research network called the Paediatric Research in Emergency Departments International Collaborative (PREDICT).
The study also showed the additional dangers faced by children in their first years of life as the average age of all presentations was 4.6 years and most of the children were in the pre-school age group.
Top of the list as the most common causes for emergency room visits were acute gastroenteritis, acute viral illness and upper respiratory tract infections.
The presentations peaked in the late winter and early spring and almost 70% of the emergency cases occurred from midday to midnight.