Hurricanes With Female Names Kill More People, Study Claims

What's This?

Image: Mashable composite, Bob Al-Greene

By Andrew Freedman2014-06-02 19:00:16 UTC

Is Joseph scarier than Josephine?

Deeply ingrained gender stereotypes make intense hurricanes with female names deadlier than their male counterparts, possibly because they are perceived to be less violent and threatening than storms with masculine names, according to a study published Monday in a high-profile scientific journal.

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The worldwide system of naming tropical storms and hurricanes was developed to improve people’s ability to reference, recall and act based on storm-related information. But if the study's findings are reproduced through other research, it would suggest that the naming system may actually be working against storm preparedness by accidentally tapping into hidden biases about gender roles and characteristics.

Simply put, people may think that intense storms with more feminine names are weaker than their male counterparts. This may cause them to evacuate in advance of a masculine-named storm and foolishly stay put in advance of an equally intense female storm. According to the study:

Men are more likely than women to commit violent behaviors, and thus males are perceived to be more strongly associated than females with negative potencies such as violence and destruction.

But outside experts who were not involved with the new study told Mashable that, though the study presents interesting results, the findings are questionable and do not justify making any changes to the naming system.

"If you had not told me that it was a real paper I would have assumed it was satire," said Robert J. Meyer, co-director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Meyer said the study ignores the improvements in the quality of storm warnings over time. The accuracy of storm warnings, he said, is one of the strongest predictors of storm-related fatalities.

"I have no problem believing the core result that when you put a female name on objects — a gun, a car, an earthquake — there is an implicit tendency among naïve subjects to ascribe less aggressive traits to it," Meyer said.

"But to take this, very small, effect observed in a web study and use it to conclude that there would have been fewer deaths in Katrina had it been named 'Ken' is simply ridiculous."

What's in a name?

The study does not accuse the American public of being a bunch of weather sexists. It suggests that hidden stereotypes and associations can skew our thinking, and therefore alter the actions we take even in life or death situations.

Satellite view of Hurricane Katrina approaching the Gulf Coast. Katrina killed about 1,800 people in 2005.

Image: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

“We’re probably not aware that the gendered associations of the name might be influencing us,” said Sharon Shavitt, co-author of the study and marketing professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She said the biases and associations are “pervasive” and “not sexist in the general sense.”

For the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers examined historical records of storms that made landfall in the U.S. since 1950, comparing the death tolls from male- and female-named storms, their intensity, as well as the damage they caused. They also investigated the perceived masculinity and femininity of certain storm names, rating them on an index.

They found that intense hurricanes with feminine names were much deadlier than similar storms with male names. This was the case even after two especially deadly female outliers — Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Audrey in 1957 — were taken out of the analysis, leaving 92 storms to be analyzed.

With about 1,800 fatalities, Katrina was the deadliest female-named storm, whereas the deadliest male storm was Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which killed 56 people directly through its winds, storm surge and inland flooding.

The study found that a hurricane with a relatively masculine name is estimated to cause about 15 deaths, whereas a hurricane of equal intensity, except with a relatively feminine name, is estimated to cause about 42 deaths.

"In other words, our model suggests that changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley to Eloise could nearly triple the death toll," Shavitt said.

The study includes indirect storm deaths, such as people who have heart attacks while doing storm cleanup.

“We all know that people are judged through the lens of gender stereotypes, but the idea that implicitly, people would be applying these gender stereotypes to weather systems… was startling to many of us,” Shavitt said. She told Mashable that the death toll differences may arise “simply because a storm with a feminine name is seen as less risky and less dangerous than one with a more masculine name.”

For an intense hurricane with the most extreme masculine name, such as “Ivan,” compared to an equally intense hurricane with the most extremely feminine name, such as “Belle,” Shavitt said the death toll of the feminine storm would be expected to increase fivefold, based on the model developed in the study.

The researchers found that the relationship between the gender of the storm name and the number of deaths caused by that storm didn’t hold up for weaker storms, which may be because those storms tend to cause fewer deaths and people usually need to take fewer protective actions to gird for them, Shavitt said.

In addition to their statistical analysis, researchers also undertook six different experiments using test subjects from the University of Illinois and from an Amazon-affiliated service for researchers called Mechanical Turk to look for differences in how people judged a storm’s intensity, potential for causing damage and deaths, as well as what actions they’d take to prepare for such a storm. Mechanical Turk allowed the researchers to outsource the recruiting of survey participants.

In most cases, the researchers only changed the sex of the storm name used in each scenario — so a Hurricane “Victor” became Hurricane “Victoria,” but all other circumstances remained the same. People in the Illinois and Mechanical Turk study did indeed view female storms as less dangerous, and this affected their hypothetical storm preparations to some extent.

None of the study's authors were meteorologists or emergency managers, although meteorologists Mashable contacted for comment said such research is outside their area of expertise.

Original idea, thin evidence

If the findings of this study are replicated by other research, it may mean that it would be safer to switch to a storm naming system that uses only male names. Or, possibly to stop naming them at all.

Since 1979, the international committee under the auspices of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization has set the storm name lists by alternating their gender with each successive storm. Before 1979, only female names were used, a switch that the study’s authors, a group of social scientists from the University of Illinois and the University of Arizona, tried to factor into their study.

Computer-generated depiction of the winds from Hurricane Sandy as the massive storm approached the Jersey shore in October 2013.

However, when they investigated only named storms after 1979, the results showed weaker ties between deaths and gender-related factors than if they included those earlier storms, which raised red flags with several outside experts.

“I think that this study is original and imaginative, and it has interesting results. Some effects are significant, though they are small — that is, people really do think of female-named hurricanes as different than male-named hurricanes — just not very differently,” said Benjamin Orlove, a Columbia University professor and co-director of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions.

"No point in telling the National Hurricane Center to start calling all hurricanes Butch and Thor,” Orlove said in an email conversation.

Orlove questioned the accuracy of the study’s historical analysis, since a small number of storms account for most of the deaths, and the gender of storm names is also unevenly distributed throughout the database.

“Even if one accepts their archival study, I still don't see how they can say that they think that the female-named storms are more deadly because people are underprepared,” Orlove said.

Because we don't know how people responded to hurricanes by names in the past, Orlove questioned using present-day University of Illinois students for the purpose of this study. Are they good proxies for past residents of the coasts?

"They are better than no proxies, but they are far from ideal,” Orlove said.

Shavitt said it’s possible that something other than gender associations accounts for the disparity in historical deaths, as well as some of the experimental findings. However, her team has not yet found such a factor.

“We’ve tested for other explanations,” she said. “We’ve tried to think of other explanations, maybe someone can come up with something.”

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 email.

“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.

For the 2014 North Atlantic hurricane season, which began on Sunday, the first storm will be named Arthur, to be followed by Bertha, and then Cristobal, and so on.

If this study is onto something, it might be wise not to underestimate Bertha.

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