Female Hurricanes are More Deadly Than Male Ones: Feminine Names Play on Stereotypes

You'd better watch out for hurricanes with female names this Atlantic hurricane season. It turns out that hurricanes with feminine names are more likely to cause significantly more deaths than hurricanes with masculine names. Why? It's because storms with feminine names are perceived as less threatening.

"The problem is that a hurricane's name has nothing to do with its severity," said Kiju Jung, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Names are assigned arbitrarily, based on a predetermined list of alternating male and female names. If people in the path of a severe storm are judging the risk based on the storm's name, then this is potentially very dangerous."

In order to better understand how people perceive differently named hurricanes, the researchers analyzed more than six decades of death rates from U.S. hurricanes. More specifically, the scientists looked at fatalities from hurricanes that made landfall from 1950 to 2012, excluding Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Audrey in 1957.

In the end, the researchers found that for highly damaging storms, the more feminine the storm's name, the more people it killed. In fact, changing a severe hurricane's name from "Charley" to "Eloise" could nearly triple its death toll.

"In judging the intensity of a storm, people appear to be applying their beliefs about how men and women behave," said Sharon Shavitt, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This makes a female-named hurricane, especially one with a very feminine name such as Belle or Cindy, seem gentler and less violent."

Hurricanes in the U.S. were formerly only given female names. Later in the 1970s, though, an alternating male-female naming system was adopted. Yet it seems as if people still view the strength of the storm in the context of gender-based expectations.

"People imagining a 'female' hurricane were not as willing to seek shelter," said Shavitt in a news release. "The stereotypes that underlie these judgments are subtle and not necessarily hostile toward women-they may involve viewing women as warmer and less aggressive as men."

The findings reveal a little bit more about how stereotypes can influence the public. More specifically, it shows how these views can greatly impact decisions that people make when it comes to preparing for hurricanes. This is extremely important considering the massive destruction that these storms can cause.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.