The early research into coronavirus suggests its transmitted through ACE-2 receptors.
Men tend to have more of these than women, so might be more at risk of infection than women, if this finding does hold out to be true.
Also the first Lancet paper on the official first 99 cases pointed out that more man than women appeared to be infected.
www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30211-7/fulltext
We observed a greater number of men than women in the 99 cases of 2019-nCoV infection. MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV have also been found to infect more males than females. The reduced susceptibility of females to viral infections could be attributed to the protection from X chromosome and sex hormones, which play an important role in innate and adaptive immunity.
Additionally, about half of patients infected by 2019-nCoV had chronic underlying diseases, mainly cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and diabetes; this is similar to MERS-CoV.19
Our results suggest that 2019-nCoV is more likely to infect older adult males with chronic comorbidities as a result of the weaker immune functions of these patients
There's been other speculation about why this might be the case
They didn't know whether this was the case but speculated that these men were more likely to be working in the market where the outbreak started or to have visited that market. They pointed out that men were more likely to come into contact with other people as they worked outside the house and be exposed to crowds, whereas women confined to domestic chores were more likely to be more socially isolated.
Spanish Flu 100 years ago is also an interesting example. A lot of men were affected precisely because in 1918 many young men were living in barracks and then were sent to field hospitals.
The pandemic mostly killed young adults rather than old people which is the norm. It didn't kill those with the weakest immune systems which is typical.
However the most vulnerable of all to spanish flu were pregnant women. Apparently the death rate was somewhere between 23% and 71% in this group.
The reason it was so bad is the flu triggered a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system), which attacks the stronger immune system of young adults. And this in turn meant the fittest men, with the strongest immune systems were most in danger of a cytokine storm.
One of the worst affected places was Western Samoa. 90% of the population was infected; 30% of adult men, 22% of adult women, and 10% of children died.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740912/?xid=PS_smithsonian
This is a research paper on spanish flu which has details (including graphs) that show that the death rate for men was higher than for women.
There is research into epidemics more generally which suggests that women are more likely to survive than men
www.pnas.org/content/115/4/E832?xid=PS_smithsonian
Different diseases have different characteristics which might follow different patterns depending on how the disease act.
So whilst responses to epidemics might be gendered, this doesn't necessarily mean that epidemics pose more of a risk to women than men.
There's an argument here that men are the weaker sex and need to be protected more from potentially hazardous tasks and to take more precautions.
Fascinating subject across the board though.