Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman…Hurricane

June 3, 2014 in Daily Bulletin

Look we didn’t do the study. We’re just helping to summarize it. Arielle Duhaime-Ross writes that female hurricanes are deadlier than male ones.

  • One study found that severe hurricanes with female names cause, on average, 42 deaths, while those with male names cause 15 deaths.
  • After 1978 hurricane names have alternated between male and female so there’s no selection bias here.
  • Instead it seems that people find a hurricane with a female name less threatening, and so take fewer measures to avoid it.
  • The study found, for example, that people are more likely to evacuate if a storm is named “Victor” instead of “Victoria”.

Read more about how hurricanes could be named to make the threat more real, why the researchers excluded Hurricane Katrina from their sample, and more over here.

Source: The Verge