Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes

Abstract

Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents' preparedness to take protective action. This finding indicates an unfortunate and unintended consequence of the gendered naming of hurricanes, with important implications for policymakers, media practitioners, and the general public concerning hurricane communication and preparedness.gender stereotypes | implicit bias | risk perception | natural hazard communication | bounded rationality E stimates suggest that hurricanes kill more than 200 people in the United States annually, and severe hurricanes can cause fatalities in the thousands (1). As the global climate changes, the frequency and severity of such storms is expected to increase (2). However, motivating hurricane preparedness remains a major challenge for local and state authorities (3). Although natural hazards such as hurricanes represent both physical and social phenomena (4, 5), meteorologists and geoscientists point out that too little attention has been paid to findings from the social sciences about subjective risk perceptions (6, 7). Those findings highlight the importance of understanding how assessments of risk from threats in the environment are often influenced not only by environmental and social cues (8, 9), but also by irrelevant psychological factors (10-12).We demonstrate that a natural disaster can, merely by being symbolically associated with a given sex through its assigned name, be judged in ways congruent with the corresponding social roles and expectations of that sex (13-16). In particular, analyses of archival data on actual fatalities caused by hurricanes in the United States (1950States ( -2012 indicate that severe hurricanes with feminine names are associated with significantly higher death rates. An explanation for this unexpected finding is tested in six experiments. These experiments show that gender-congruent perceptions of intensity and strength are responsible for malenamed hurricanes being perceived as riskier and more intense than female-named hurricanes. These findings have important implications for hurricane preparedness and public safety.US hurricanes used to be given only female names, a practice that meteorologists of a different era considered appropriate due to such characteristics of hurricanes as unpredictability (17). This practice came to an end in the late 1970s with increasing societal awareness of sexism, and an alternating male-female naming system was adopted (17). Even though the gender of hurricanes is now preassigned and arbitrary, the question remains: do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations?Research shows that women and men are socialized to have different social ro...

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“…Instead, to address population at risk, fatality counts can be adjusted for contemporaneous US population in our original model (1). [For example, Hurricane Edna's 20 deaths in 1954 (US population: 163,000,000) would be adjusted to 39 deaths (US population in 2012: 314,000,000); population data source: US Census Bureau.]…”

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