Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes

Status
Not open for further replies.
Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes

rita.jpg




Hurricane Rita


People don’t take hurricanes as seriously if they have a feminine name and the consequences are deadly, finds a new groundbreaking study.


Female-named storms have historically killed more because people neither consider them as risky nor take the same precautions, the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes.


Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning 1950 and 2012. Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities. (The study excluded Katrina and Audrey, outlier storms that would skew the model).


The difference in death rates between genders was even more pronounced when comparing strongly masculine names versus strongly feminine ones.


“[Our] model suggests that changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley … to Eloise … could nearly triple its death toll,” the study says.

Sharon Shavitt, study co-author and professor of marketing at the University of Illinois, says the results imply an “implicit sexism”; that is, we make decisions about storms based on the gender of their name without even knowing it.




Please open this link to watch the video

Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don?t respect them, study finds
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top