Ed Yong takes note of “a simple fact with an uncertain explanation: historically, hurricanes with female names have, on average, killed more people than those with male ones”:
Kiju Jung from the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign made this discovery after
analyzing archival data about the 94 hurricanes that hit the US between 1950 and 2012. As they write, “changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley to Eloise could nearly triple its death toll.” …
[The] Jung team thinks that the effect he found is due to unfortunate stereotypes that link men with strength and aggression, and women with warmth and passivity. Thanks to these biases, people might take greater precautions to protect themselves from Hurricane Victor, while reacting more apathetically to Hurricane Victoria. “These kinds of implicit biases routinely affect the way actual men and women are judged in society,” says Sharon Shavitt, who helped to design the study. “It appears that these gender biases can have deadly consequences.”
Michael Silverberg elaborates:
By rating each hurricane name on a scale of how gendered it was—the most masculine names received 1; girliest names scored an 11—the authors created what they called a “masculine-feminine index.” (Hurricane Judd would likely be rated close to a 1, while Hurricane Anastasia would come in around 11. A more androgynously named Hurricane Sam would presumably fall somewhere in the middle.)
The storms with the highest loss of life also happened to score closer to 11 on the MFI. Follow-up experiments confirmed a correlation between gender and perceived risk. In one such study, participants were asked to rate the destructiveness of a hypothetical storm given a male or female name. They consistently found Hurricane Victor much more menacing than Hurricane Victoria.
But the issue may not be so cut-and-dry:
According to Jeff Lazo, an economist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, there are many factors that influence storm-preparedness decisions, from prior experience with storms to socio-demographics. “Trying to suggest that a major factor in this is the gender name of the event with a very small sample of real events… is a very big stretch,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I feel that their analysis has basically shown that individuals respond to gender. I am not sure it has applicability to hurricane response. I certainly would not base policy decisions on this study alone,” he said.
Melissa Dahl is also skeptical:
The numbers here just aren’t sturdy enough. The researchers analyzed death rates from hurricanes over the last six decades – but until 1979, hurricanes were only given feminine names. So it’s a bit of a stretch to use three decades of female-only names to reach the conclusion that storms with ladylike names caused more death and destruction. Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, expressed skepticism in an e-mail:
If you look at their archival study, you’ll see that their coefficient was not statistically significant! That doesn’t mean the effect isn’t there, but it does mean that their sample sizes are low, and when you’re talking about hurricane deaths, you don’t have the data to say much more conclusive than that.
Moreover, as Gelman noted, there could be other reasons people react differently to the names – one of the names used in the experiments was “Big Bertha,” for example, which likely brings to mind the nickname “Big Bertha.” (Sure enough, “Bertha” was rated scarier than Arthur, Cristobal, Kyle, and Marco.)
Former National Hurricane Center director Bill Read sees other issues at play:
While the gender bias is likely real, I don’t think it plays a significant role in human response to an approaching landfall. The test conducted for the study involved people who were not under the stress of an approaching hurricane. As quoted in the article, while necessary to eke out the gender difference, it leaves me with the need to know if is this factor significant, or is it very minor in the mix of all other societal and event driven responses. My experience with Rita (massive (over) response to evacuation orders) and Ike (less than ideal response) is a point in fact. In the case of Rita (sweet female), the events three weeks earlier due to Katrina were cited as a contributing factor to over reaction. For Ike (bad boy male), the horrific evacuation for Rita was cited as a reason for under response. I used to think, and still do with caveats, that a more important driver is how strong the storm is at the time action is required. Rita was a Cat 4 heading to 5 when decision time came. Ike was a Cat 2. These two real world events had exactly the opposite response one would expect from the gender bias paper.
(Image hat tip: Alex Lobo)
The Dish 