Hurricanes with female names deadlier
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E-mail Xinhua, June 3, 2014
Hurricanes with feminine names are likely to cause more deaths than hurricanes with masculine names, according to an analysis of more than six decades of hurricane death rates in the United States.
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Hurricane Sandy hit US in October 2012. [File photo] |
The study, published Monday in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the reason is very simple because a storm with a feminine name is seen as less foreboding than one with a more masculine name.
As a result, people in the path of these severe storms may take fewer protective measures, leaving them more vulnerable to harm, said the study by researchers of the University of Illinois.
"The problem is that a hurricane's name has nothing to do with its severity ... (it is) assigned arbitrarily, based on a predetermined list of alternating male and female names," said lead author Kiju Jung, a doctoral student in marketing in Illinois. "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. "
Jung and colleagues examined actual hurricane fatalities for all storms that made landfalls in the United States from 1950 to 2012, excluding Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Hurricane Audrey (1957) because they were much deadlier than the typical storm.
They found that for highly damaging storms, the more feminine the storm's name is, the more people it killed. The analysis suggested that changing a severe hurricane's name from the masculine "Charley" to the feminine "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, a professor of marketing at Illinois and a co- author of the report. "This makes a female-named hurricane, especially one with a very feminine name such as Belle or Cindy, seem gentler and less violent."
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